


All Fun and Games (Until Someone Loses A Soul)

by Misfit_McCoward



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:15:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 28,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25440739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misfit_McCoward/pseuds/Misfit_McCoward
Summary: The summer he turns ten, Harry gets new neighbors. They are very weird, the Dursleys are VERY scandalized, and Harry has the greatest year ever.OR: Bakura and the Ishtars try to have normal, non-criminal lives in a new country and fail.
Relationships: Thief King Bakura & Harry Potter, Yami Bakura & Harry Potter
Comments: 127
Kudos: 337





	1. good fences make good neighbors

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this today instead of my Camp NaNoWriMo project. :(
> 
> Bakura gets his own body after the final duel because.... reasons. :)

The day the _For Sale_ sign was removed from Number 6 Privet Drive was the start of the best summer of Harry’s life. 

Aunt Petunia had been following the drama of their previous neighbor’s divorce with intense attention, from the wife taking her children with her to a new job in the US, to the husband sitting in his car in the driveway every morning and crying. Petunia had toured the house twice while it was on the market, and spent hours pretending to prune their dividing hedge, spying on potential buyers. 

Petunia in a busybody mood was surely annoying for their neighbors, but it was Harry’s favorite brand of Aunt Petunia. She didn’t make him do as many outside chores, because she wanted to be the one to snoop on their neighbors. She always paid less attention to him, and he could get away with sneaking snacks and hiding Dudley’s forgotten toys in his cupboard. 

The new neighbor came on the first day of Harry’s summer break. Harry was at the kitchen sink, washing dishes from breakfast, when Petunia suddenly sucked a huge gulp of air in through her teeth.

She leaned into the window, her face centimeters from the glass, the spray bottle of generic cleaner forgotten in her hands. 

“She’s so  _ young,” _ Petunia gasped. “What is she wearing?”

Harry craned his neck to try and see around Petunia out the window. All he could really see was the large shape of a moving van. 

“Here,” Petunia said, dropping the spray bottle onto the counter. “Finish cleaning up. I have to go trim the hedges.”

She hurried out, and Harry hopped off his stool at the sink to peer out the window himself. 

The new neighbor was, in Harry’s opinion, the most beautiful woman he’d seen not on television. She had thick black hair so dark it shone blue in the June sun, smooth brown skin, and a white linen dress that looked distinctly foreign on the streets of Little Whinging. She did not look or dress at all like Petunia or any of Petunia’s friends, and the effect made Harry’s young mind think she must be some sort of glamorous movie star. 

There were two movers as well, and the new neighbor stood in the driveway directing them for a few minutes before following one into the house. She walked with perfect, almost regal posture. 

Harry went back to washing dishes. He was sure Petunia would update them all about the mysterious new woman next door over dinner. 

xXx

Petunia, of course, updated them all at breakfast and at dinner every day for the next week. She was so engrossed in her new favorite drama that she didn’t tell Harry off for serving himself too much food or complain that he chewed too loudly. 

The new neighbor was named Ishizu Ishtar and she was a museum curation specialist from Egypt. She had just gotten a job in London, although previously she’d worked all over the world. 

“How’s she affording that house on a curator salary?” Uncle Vernon asked, frowning across the table at his wife. “It’s got the same floor plan as ours.”

“I don’t know,” Petunia said, her eyes bright with the promise of new, juicy gossip to be found. “Do you think her family is rich?”

“I think,” Vernon started, leaning back in his chair and settling into one of his rants about freaks invading the neighborhood, “that property values around here have been dropping ever since all the dregs of London started getting pushed out.”

The next day, Ishizu’s brother moved in. He rode a motorcycle, had hair past his shoulders, and wore a shirt that showed off several inches of his bare belly. Petunia nearly fainted from the sheer scandalous nature of it. 

“His earrings are bigger than mine,” Petunia gushed over dinner, which Harry had to finish making because Petunia kept abandoning it to stare out the window some more.  _ “And  _ they look like they’re real gold.”

The brother had hitched a trailer filled with boxes behind his motorcycle, and then left the trailer parked in the front lawn of the house. It was the most disrespectful thing Petunia had ever seen, and she’d been struggling to tear herself away from the window all day. 

“Freaks, the lot of them,” Vernon diagnosed, nodding sagely. “Miss Ishtar might seem like a nice professional, but you know these foreign types–”

“Professional, but not married,” Petunia agreed, eyes alight with scandal. “Probably some sort of delinquent. How could a woman who looks like that not have a husband?” 

“How are they affording gold jewelry?” Vernon said. “That boy looks like he’s never had a proper job in his life. Who would hire a kid with hair that long–”

“–and obviously  _ bleached,” _ Petunia agreed.

“Something fishy’s going on,” Vernon concluded. “Stay clear of those sorts, Dudders.”

Dudley was forbidden from speaking to the Ishtars. It just made Harry want to meet them even more. 

xXx

Dudley was not allowed to roam the neighborhood unsupervised, but Petunia cared less about Harry being kidnapped off the streets. As long as he showed up at the house on time for his chores, Harry was free to wonder. 

There wasn’t really a lot to do in Little Whinging, but Harry’s primary school was in walking distance and had a playground with a wooded area behind it. Harry would play on the monkeybars until he got bored, then go and see if there was anything interesting in the woods. 

One day when he was coming home– having triumphantly found both a salamander and a huge ring of mushrooms– he found a strange man at the mailbox of Number 6 Privet Drive. 

The man had the same dark skin as the Ishtars, but that was where the resemblance ended. He was shorter and stockier than Miss Ishtar’s brother, with wild white hair that would make Petunia have a conniption. Where Miss Ishtar and her brother had delicate features, this man’s face was sharp and mean looking. 

The man was flipping through the mail, scowling at each letter. When he noticed Harry staring, he turned to him fully and snapped, “What?”

The other side of his face had three dramatic scars, going from his eye all the way down his cheek. Harry had never seen another person with facial scars before, and his hand instinctively went to his forehead. 

“Do you want something?” the man sneered. He had a faint accent. 

Harry’s survival instinct was to just mind his own business. On the other hand, he was curious, and this man looked a bit cool…

“Do you know the Ishtars, sir?” Harry asked. 

“No, I’m just going through their mail because I’m a criminal,” the man answered. 

“Um,” said Harry. 

The man ignored him and kept flipping through the envelopes. When Harry made to leave, the man asked, “Hey, kid, do you know what to do with mail that’s addressed wrong?”

“Sir?” Harry hedged. 

“Most of this shit’s for the previous resident,” the man said, and Petunia would wash his mouth out with soap if she heard him say the s-word. “If I just leave it, will the postman take it away?”

Harry thought about it. If this man was like the Ishtars, he had probably just moved from some far away country, and maybe he didn’t know how their mail service worked, even if he was an adult. 

“My aunt always writes something on it first,” Harry said. “I don’t know what. Sorry.”

The man grunted. “Well, that’s annoying,” he said, and then closed the mailbox and went into Number 6. 

Petunia was at the front door when Harry entered. 

“Who was that?” she asked, speaking quicker than normal. “Another brother? A boyfriend?”

“He didn’t say,” Harry answered, deciding it would be prudent not to tell his aunt that the man said he was a criminal. 

Petunia huffed, glared at him, and then went into a tirade about troublemakers flocking together. 

xXx

The strange man was named Bakura and he was “a friend” of the Ishtars. Vernon learned all this on Saturday, when he asked Bakura if they could move the trailer off their lawn. The conversation ended with Bakura telling Vernon to go do something very rude. 

Miss Ishtar came over later that day and apologized. Vernon turned purple and Petunia gawked, but Miss Ishtar’s voice was so soothing and polite neither of them could complain. She had the same accent as Bakura. 

“Miss, let me give you some advice,” Vernon finally said, when he’d calmed himself down from purple to red. “Some people are determined not to contribute to society, and you’d do best to cut them loose.”

“Duly noted,” Miss Ishtar said blandly. “With that advice taken into consideration, I’ll be leaving.”

Miss Ishtar was back in her own house by the time Vernon had worked out what she’d just said to him. His face went right back to purple. 

Impotent to lash out at the originator of his humiliation, Vernon ordered Harry into his cupboard for the rest of the day. 

The next neighbor incident occurred just the following afternoon, when Dudley had his friend Piers over. They’d been eating sandwiches in the backyard and decided to use the hole in the privacy fence to spy on the weird neighbors.

(The hole in the fence was the one part of the lawn allowed to not be immaculate, as Petunia also dedicated much of her time to spying on the neighbors.)

Harry had not been around to witness the event, as the presence of Piers often turned into a game of Harry Hunting, and he’d elected to get a headstart on his weekend chore of cleaning the bathrooms. However, he had been around to witness the aftermath, which involved a lot of tears and then a lot of demands. 

As far as Harry could gather, Bakura and Miss Ishtar’s brother (whose name started with an M, but Petunia and Vernon exclusively referred to as “The Brother”) had set up to play Duel Monsters in their own yard. Duel Monsters was all the rage now, and so Dudley and Piers had been naturally excited to watch. Dudley had “asked politely” for the neighbors to show them their cards. Harry wondered what exactly Dudley’s word choice was because the conversation ended with The Brother grabbing the garden house and shooting water at the children through the hole in the fence. 

“And Bakura laughed at us,” Dudley finished through his sobs. “He was really mean about it.”

“My poor Diddykins,” Petunia cooed, already in the process of making him and Piers ice cream sundaes. 

“Mummy,” Dudley continued wetly.  _ “I _ want Duel Monsters cards.”

“Well, we’ll get you some for your birthday.”

“But I want them  _ now.” _

Dudley threw a fit. Piers, used to this behavior, just shoveled down ice cream as fast as he could for when Petunia inevitably agreed to drive them to the game shop one town over. 

When both boys were gone with Petunia, and Harry had cleaned all the bathrooms, and Vernon was snoring on the couch in front of the television, Harry crept out into the backyard. He could hear Bakura and The Brother talking loudly, playfully insulting each other the way friends on TV did but none of Dudley’s friends ever dared. 

Duel Monsters had been a fad at school all year long. It was very cool– lots of older siblings played it, and you could watch celebrities on television play it with holograms. Petunia and Vernon had wrinkled their noses at the holograms, calling them ugly slights of hand, and so Dudley hadn’t shown much interest in it until recently, when he was home all day and could just whine until Petunia let him turn on any channel he wanted. 

Harry had caught a few glimpses in the past couple of weeks. It looked awesome, like magic, which was probably why it made Petunia’s face go all funny. 

Of course, Bakura and The Brother were just at a stone table in the yard, leftover from the previous resident. Harry could recognize the cards as Duel Monsters, but from the other side of a fence, he couldn’t see what was happening on the table at all. 

“God, they’re back,” The Brother suddenly said, leaning around Bakura to glare at the fence. 

“Who cares?” Bakura answered. “Embarrassed some kids will see how bad you’re about to lose?”

“If I lose, it’s because we switched decks, and you designed yours like a crazy person,” The Brother shot back. 

It was unclear to Harry who won when the game finally ended, because they both managed to gloat over it. They started to clean up and Harry was about to back inside, when The Brother’s eye was suddenly half a foot away from him on the other side of the fence. 

“Holy crap, it’s yet another kid,” he exclaimed. “How many do they  _ have?” _

“Sorry, sir,” Harry said. “It was rude of me to spy.”

“And yet you’re still peeping at me,” The Brother answered, grinning wickedly. “Why don’t you tell your parents that if they want their fence repaired, Bakura here is a broke bastard who’ll fix it up for a small fee?”

“Shut  _ up, _ Malik,” Bakura said, and then physically dragged him away from the fence. 

“Any odd job, really,” Malik continued, yelling across the lawn at Harry as Bakura pushed him towards the house. “Yardwork, errands, babysitting–”

Harry jumped when suddenly Petunia was right behind him. 

“What,” she snapped, “are you doing?”

Dudley had gotten his card game. He and Piers smirked at Harry as he was marched to his cupboard, cards in hand. 

xXx

Dudley’s tenth birthday came, and he received a grand total of forty presents, including a box of Duel Monsters booster packs to go with the starter deck purchased just the week before, and a duel disk. 

“This is the old version!” Dudley complained. “There’s a new one out now. Piers said so.”

“The new one isn’t out in the UK yet, sweetums,” Petunia said. “We’ll get you one when it’s released here, won’t we, Vernon?”

Vernon scoffed. “I don’t see the point, anyway. Monster battling? Ludicrous.”

“Everyone is playing it,” Dudley pouted. 

Sensing an eruption, Petunia shooed Harry away from the stove to serve the eggs he was frying to Dudley.

Harry expected to spend the rest of the day in his cupboard, reading Dudley’s old magazines about computer games Harry would never get to play, while Petunia hosted Dudley’s birthday party. Instead, Dudley announced he wanted to go to the park and play with his new duel disk with his friends. 

“I guess we could take the food as a picnic,” Petunia said, sounding very stressed. 

Harry had to help her pack things, including running down to the store to get something to transport the cake with. When he came back, half the guests had arrived, and Petunia was desperately trying to convince Dudley to put on a sun hat. She was so stressed she didn’t even check the receipt to make sure Harry was giving back the right amount of change. 

Once the car trunk was loaded and Vernon had figured out sitting arrangements, Petunia suddenly looked down at Harry in horror. 

“Did you call Mrs. Figg?” she asked. 

“Was I supposed to?” Harry asked.

Petunia rushed inside and tried ringing Mrs. Figg three times with no answer. 

“What are you doing?” Vernon asked, appearing at the kitchen door. “The kids are getting antsy.”

“He needs a babysitter,” Petunia said, and Vernon glowered down at Harry like he had planned this. 

Petunia took a deep breath, grabbed Harry by the back of his shirt, and marched him over to Number 6. Miss Ishtar answered the door, not looking the least surprised to see Petunia and Harry there. 

“Can I help you?” she asked. 

“I heard your– Bakura– is looking for odd jobs,” Petunia said curtly, and Miss Ishtar nodded once. “Is he free for babysitting today?”


	2. home is where the card games are

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bakura is not the WORST babysitter, but he's certainly not a good one either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is going to alternate between Harry and Bakura's POVs. :)

Bakura was, technically speaking, over three thousand years old. He knew dark magic so ancient mankind had forgotten it; he’d robbed the most sacred of graves and laughed; he’d nearly destroyed the world as they knew it; he’d been so proficient at escaping death that Sisyphus himself would turn green with envy. 

Bakura was confused about how he’d ended up with a babysitting gig. 

“This is Harry,” Ishizu said. “I got his mother up to twelve pounds an hour.”

“She’s my aunt, actually,” Harry corrected hurriedly. As an afterthought he added, “Miss.”

Bakura recognized him as the boy who lived next door at Number 4, tiny with unbrushed hair and clothes that were too big. He barely looked like the rest of his family at all– too olive-skinned and dark-haired– although something about his eyes reminded Bakura of that awful horse-faced woman. Harry blinked up at Bakura with open curiosity.

Ishizu just left them alone in the kitchen, despite having an in-depth knowledge of Bakura’s checkered past.  _ Bakura _ wouldn’t leave a child alone with Bakura. 

Then again, Bakura had about twenty pounds to his name. Twelve pounds an hour to make sure a kid didn’t chop off his own hands was a great deal. 

“How long are you here for?” Bakura asked. 

Harry shrugged. “Until my cousin’s birthday party is over, I guess.”

Bakura had no idea why the busybody at Number 4 couldn’t have just taken both kids to the party, but he didn’t care enough to examine the thought beyond mild irritation. He simultaneously hoped the party went for a while, so he could make more money, and that the party would get cancelled immediately, so he could get rid of the kid. 

“Okay,” Bakura said, standing from where he’d been flipping through the help wanted section of the paper at the kitchen table. “Follow me.”

Harry followed him dutifully into the living room, his head swivelling to take in all the details of Ishizu’s house, including a bafflingly inquisitive little pause to eye the door to their storage closet under the stairs.

Malik was in the living room, splayed out on the couch and watching some mindless program about aliens. 

“Bakura,” he said without looking up, “You’ve got to see this dumb show. They think aliens built the pyra– what the hell?”

Malik propped himself up on an elbow, eyebrows raised at Harry. Harry ogled him right back. Malik, with his stupid jewelry and dumb fashion choices, was probably the most exciting looking person this poor kid had ever seen. 

“Why is there a kid in our house?” Malik asked. 

“I’m watching him,” Bakura said, although he sounded alarmingly unconfident in this arrangement. Pointing at one of their two unmatched, secondhand arm chairs, Bakura commanded, “Sit.”

Harry sat. He looked pleased with the chair. 

“Good,” Bakura said, and then went back to the kitchen. 

Being tied to the Ishtars had never been in any of Bakura's convoluted and sprawling plans for world destruction. He’d just sort of assumed he’d plunge the world into darkness and then die, or fail and then die anyway. Best case scenario, his soul might have dissolved into some sort of malevolent mist to plague humanity for the rest of eternity. 

Instead, the end result of the Pharaoh’s banishment of Zorc Necrophades was Bakura getting his physical form back to live the rest of his days in a regular body. This was deeply frustrating to him, as regular bodies needed things like  _ food _ and  _ rest. _ Evil spirits could go off and do whatever they wanted, but Bakura had to do  _ laundry.  _

He knew he was lucky Ishizu let him live under her roof, but she insisted he pay her back not with money or goods, but by getting a legitimate mundane human job. 

It was stupid. Bakura was tempted to just hop ship and try and destroy the world again, it was so stupid. Unfortunately, having Zorc excised from his soul meant he no longer felt the drive to become evil incarnate, which was the stupidest thing of all. 

“Dude, you can’t just leave me with the kid,” Malik said from the kitchen door. “I’m going to charge a commission fee.”

Bakura snarled some rude words at him, but relocated to the living room with his newspaper. He ended up not reading it at all, because the documentary Malik was watching was too absurd to look away. 

He watched as an American man tried to take a torch into a tomb, only for the fire to be snuffed out. “Not enough oxygen,” he declared. “How could the Egyptians have built this with no light source?”

“Love the insinuation Egyptians no longer exist,” Malik quipped from where he’d strewn himself back across the couch.

“Maybe you’re all the descendants of the aliens,” Bakura answered drily. 

The man in the documentary transitioned into a delightfully wrong interpretation of what he claimed to be a carving of an ancient Egyptian lightbulb. Bakura sat through another segment on something called the Baghdad Battery before abruptly remembering he was technically working right now. 

Harry had stayed perfectly silent, watching the television intently. He looked intrigued by the man’s crazy theories, which would not have bothered Bakura if it didn’t intersect with his own history. 

“Kid,” Bakura said, and Harry looked up. “They don’t teach you this shit in school, do they?”

“Don’t say ‘shit’ in front of a kid,” Malik said, not sounding at all offended. Bakura ignored him. 

“Um, I’m not sure,” Harry answered. His tone was very polite, and Bakura remembered being called  _ sir _ at the mailbox. “I don’t really remember what we learned about the pyramids.”

“A true academic,” Malik drawled. Harry did not seem to even notice the insult. 

Now that people were paying attention to him, Harry showed himself to be rather talkative. “This is interesting though,” he continued. “I don’t think my aunt and uncle would let me learn about aliens.”

“Aliens aren’t real, kid,” Malik said, grabbing for the remote of the coffee table. With a mean grin in Harry’s direction, he added, “Ancient Egyptian curses totally are, though.” 

Harry’s face perked up, and Bakura barked out a laugh. 

xXx

Bakura led Harry back into the kitchen when Malik loudly commented that Harry’s stomach was growling and that Bakura was “just going to let him wither away into nothing, like all the other crying children Bakura babysat.”

If Harry found the comment alarming, he didn’t show it. 

Harry sat very quietly at the table while Bakura glared at the inside of the fridge. No one in the house was much of a cook, and they didn’t keep much food. There was a full carton of eggs, though. Could he serve a child in his care _ just  _ scrambled eggs for lunch?

No, that was silly; the child was the perfect excuse to eat the rest of the Ishtars’ Chinese takeaway. Bakura divided beef and broccoli and rice onto two plates and microwaved them both. Harry looked genuinely eager when Bakura dropped the smaller portion in front of him. 

“I’ve never had Chinese before,” Harry said excitedly, and that was probably the most pathetic thing Bakura had heard in a while. 

They ate in awkward silence. Harry ate quickly, like he was in a bit of a rush, but Bakura noted he made sure not to clink his fork against the plate too loudly or make too much noise with his mouth. The rush to eat almost reminded Bakura of being a half-starved kid in the village of thieves, where you had to share your food with bunches of siblings and cousins, and whoever could shove the most into their mouth the fastest got the most to eat. 

Except this was a ritzy neighborhood where people wasted water on green gardens. Children were always full at the end of meals. Harry was clearly fighting the battle between polite eating and greedily stuffing his face. 

“So,” Bakura said, watching Harry hop off his chair with his empty plate in hand. “How old are you?”

“I’ll be ten next month!” Harry declared, and then gathered up Bakura’s empty plate as well. 

_ What the hell?  _ Bakura thought as Harry pushed a chair to the sink to stand on, then started washing the plates. Not that Bakura was complaining, but were children…  _ supposed _ to be this helpful?

“And what do ten year olds…. do?” Bakura asked. 

Harry gave him an odd look. “What do you mean?”

What had Ryou done when he was ten? Games? Children liked games, right? Bakura could totally play a game with a nine year old. 

“You were spying on me and Malik playing cards before, right?” Bakura said, leaning his chair back on two legs as he watched Harry automatically move on to the dirty dishes that had been left in the sink to “soak” for god knows how long. 

Harry had the grace to look embarrassed. “My aunt said I wasn’t to look,” he mumbled. 

It was a statement that was probably meant as an apology, but Bakura felt a grin crack across his face. “You weren’t allowed, so obviously you had to do it, didn’t you, Harry?” he teased. 

It sounded mean because Bakura always sounded mean. Harry blushed and scrubbed harder at a pan that might have been in the sink when they moved in. 

“Stay there,” Bakura said, and then shuffled upstairs to collect his cards from his room. 

When he came back down, Ishizu was helping Harry put away now cleaned and dried dishes. 

“Why was our  _ guest _ doing the washing up?” Ishizu snapped at Bakura. 

“I always do the washing up for Mrs. Figg,” Harry said, puzzled. “She says it helps with her arthritis.” 

“None of us have arthritis, Harry,” Ishizu said gently. 

“Speak for yourself,” Bakura said, crossing his arms. “Some of us are thousands of years old.”

Ishizu pursed her lips angrily at him, but Harry giggled and the annoyance melted off her face. 

“At least put the dishes away then,” Ishizu said, and then drifted out of the kitchen. 

“Eh, just leave them on the counter,” Bakura told Harry, and then dropped his heavy plastic box of cards onto the table. 

Ryou and he had had a bit of a custody battle over his cards. Bakura’s deck had been bought with Ryou’s money, after all, and it was Ryou who had designed the base deck. Bakura thought he’d have no problems just laughing in Ryou’s face and taking whatever he wanted from him, but… 

Well, it turned out if you have the embodiment of pure evil banished from your soul, you sometimes discover you actually _ like _ the little idiot you spent the last ten years sharing a body with. 

So. Ryou got to keep most of the cards, and Bakura had spent the last two years trying to make a new, better deck. The end result was that he had a  _ lot  _ of extra cards he didn’t mind a kid putting his sticky hands on. 

“Wow!” Harry gasped, and forgot whatever manners his aunt had drilled into him, reaching for the box. 

Bakura didn’t care that the kid wasn’t even ten yet. He liked when people were impressed with him. 

He spread some cards across the table, watching Harry sort through with keen interest. He didn’t go through them with any method, just picking up random cards and setting them back down. Bakura suspected he was just pulling ones with pictures that he liked.

“Oh,” Harry said, picking up a Witch of the Black Forest. “My aunt and uncle aren’t going to like this. Maybe my cousin will get in trouble.”

He grinned down at the card at the idea of it. Bakura quirked an eyebrow. 

“What do you mean?” he asked. Perhaps Harry was jealous his cousin was at a party while he was stuck here. Bakura could always support a little petty vengeance. 

“They don’t like anything that has to do with magic,” Harry explained. “They say it’s ‘funny business’ for degenerates. Not even Dudley’s allowed. But they bought him a bunch of cards for his birthday today.”

Harry looked happier than he had all day, staring down at the Witch of the Black Forest. 

A mean urge twitched at the back of Bakura’s mind. He’d seen how Harry had lit up at the idea of ancient curses on tombs. Bakura could  _ show _ Harry magic, if he wanted. They could play a game and Bakura could bring the game to life. Surely it was fine to play a shadow game, if Harry  _ wanted _ to see it. 

Ishizu wouldn’t approve. She was upstairs, working on her computer. Maybe if he was fast–

“Already challenging kids to death matches?” Malik asked, entering the kitchen and heading directly to the fridge. “Did you eat my fucking leftovers, you bastar–”

Malik paused and looked down at Harry, watching him with wide eyes. Malik didn’t look guilty, but mumbled something under his breath that had much cleaner wording. 

“The kid was hungry,” Bakura said, not even trying to hide his smirk. 

Malik raised his hand with the clear intent of flipping bakura off, aborted the action as his eyes flicked back down to Harry, and then went back to poking through the fridge, muttering angrily to himself. 

“How do you play this, anyway?” Harry asked.

Bakura was not built to explain things to children. He gave a halting, disorganized explanation of the basics of the game while Malik fried up some eggs and the single potato in their cupboard. 

“Magic cards…?” Harry repeated, picking up the closest green card to him. “Dudley might even get grounded. That’s never happened before.”

He sounded hopeful. It was adorably spiteful. 

“Oh?” Bakura said, unable to help himself. “You sure look happy about it. What did your cousin ever do to you?”

“Well,” Harry said, and a very pained expression crossed his face. Instead of answering, he asked, “Can I play? I might never get to again.”

Lately, Bakura and Malik had been inventing challenges to keep playing against the same person over and over interesting. They’d tried using each other’s decks, and then using Ishizu and Rishid’s decks. This time, Bakura shuffled the cards on the table and dealt them randomly into two piles of forty five cards. Bakura would guide Harry through playing Malik. 

“Tough luck, kid,” Malik said through a mouthful of egg, drawing his starting hand. “You’re going to lose, even with this jerk helping you.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Bakura said. “He can barely even read his cards.”

The game was… kind of dumb. It was impossible to strategize with random, unknown cards in your deck, and most of them weren’t even very good cards. 

For the first half of the game, Harry just followed Bakura’s instructions, and they stayed more or less tied with Malik. The minute Harry felt like he was getting the hang of the game, though, he started arguing. 

“But I want to play _ this _ one,” Harry said, twisting to glare at Bakura. With this messy hair and his glasses that didn’t sit quite right on his face, the expression just made him look sort of silly. 

“Why don’t you play it and find out what happens, then,” Bakura said, eyes narrowing. 

Harry’s monster was immediately destroyed, and the kid pouted. Unfortunately, it turned out that polite little Harry was also incredibly stubborn, and he refused to learn his lesson and listen to anymore of Bakura’s instructions. 

Bakura clicked his tongue in annoyance and went to see if they had any drinks in the fridge, abandoning Harry to Malik’s wrath. Ishizu would probably have a fit if he drank beer on the job, but he could have her… whatever “cucumber and lime water” was. 

Bakura poured himself a glass, and then turned to watch the end of the game. Harry didn’t win, but he did manage to drag it out longer than he should have been able to, because Malik stopped drawing any monster cards. 

The look on Malik’s face every time he drew was hilarious. Malik was good enough he could beat a small child even with a random assemblage of trap and magic cards, but it was close.  _ Embarrassingly _ close. 

While Harry spread the cards back out across the table to stare at them some more, Malik grabbed Bakura by the elbow and pulled him aside. 

“That wasn’t normal,” he hissed. 

“What? You nearly losing to a kid who can’t even figure out a hairbrush?” Bakura goaded, elbowing Malik in the ribs. “That seems pretty normal to me.”

“Shut up,” Malik answered, elbowing him back. “That’s not what I meant. The cards you had out were mostly monster cards.”

Bakura rolled his eyes. “So you're upset you pulled a statistically improbable hand? Grow up.”

Bakura watched as Harry started sorting the cards by type. Nothing about the kid had seemed off, but now that Bakura really  _ looked _ at him… there was  _ something  _ about Harry _ , _ some inexplicable thing bothering Bakura at the back of his mind. 

Suddenly, Harry seemed a lot more interesting. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You ever show up to the middle school lunch table with your Yu-Gi-Oh cards, ready to make all your friends weep at the sting of their own humiliating defeat, and then you just draw five magic cards for your starting hand?


	3. duel disks in the closet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry gets in trouble, then starts some trouble.

Bakura was a million times a better babysitter than Mrs. Figg, Harry decided. Bakura let him keep going through the cards, even after Malik left to go make “business phone calls.” At one point, Bakura produced a box of biscuits and tossed two across the table at Harry. There was no mention of cats.

Harry wasn’t sure he liked the game itself, but Duel Monsters was definitely a sort of forbidden fruit of his primary school. They were only allowed the cards out during free time, and people always formed huddles around whoever had brought their cards in that day. Harry, having most of his chances at friendship poisoned by Dudley, rarely got to even look at them, let alone touch. 

The pictures on the cards were very cool, ranging from beautiful angels to gruesome monsters. All of them were fantastical. Vernon’s face might advance from purple all the way up to green when he saw them. 

“Have you ever seen– um,” Harry started to ask. Bakura looked up from where he was glaring very intently at his newspaper, as if it had personally insulted his mother. Harry had noticed Bakura was pouring over the jobs posting section, and occasionally deepening his scowl and drawing an  _ X _ over a listing. Most of the page was crossed out by now. 

(The Dursleys viewed job hunting as something that only happened to hooligans who couldn’t get proper introductions to businesses by friends and family– Petunia had loudly mocked a “help wanted” sign at the game shop when she’d come back with Dudley’s present. However, as Harry felt confident that his family would never introduce him to anyone who wasn’t a police officer, Harry felt a bit sorry for Bakura.)

“What?” Bakura snapped when Harry didn’t immediately clarify his aborted question. Everything Bakura said had a certain shade of meanness to it, even when he said nice things. Harry assumed some people were just like that, as his aunt and uncle both had a sort of mean condescension to them, even when talking to their friends. 

“You know,” Harry said and then made a very large gesture with his arms. “Have you ever seen the big– hologram games. In person, not just on TV?”

Bakura stared at him for a few seconds like he was some sort of idiot– a typical response to Harry speaking up, so he wasn’t concerned– and then a knowing smirk spread across Bakura’s face. 

“Yes,” Bakura answered, all his teeth showing. “Get your aunt to hire me again and maybe I’ll show you.”

Petunia would faint on the spot if Bakura did that. Harry strongly hoped Mrs. Figg decided she couldn’t take him anymore. 

The Dursleys returned earlier than Harry had expected– usually Dudley could badger his parents into a shopping trip and ice cream– and they heard the screaming of excited children all the way in the kitchen. Unable to control himself, Harry hopped off his chair and made a beeline for the living room window to spy on them. 

Harry liked the Ishtar’s living room a lot more than the meticulously clean one Petunia kept. Number 6 was the exact size and dimensions of Number 4, and so Harry felt oddly like he was looking at some sort of hilarious  _ what-if  _ scenario of what his life might be like with a different family. The Ishtars had put their TV against the same wall, but none of the furniture matched, and the floors had a cream-colored carpet dotted with stains instead of hardwood and area rugs. The Ishtars had no carefully arranged family photos, or any decorations on the walls at all, but the room somehow maintained more personality than the entire Dursley residence. 

(The weirdest part, of course, was that the wall under the stairs– including the cupboard door– was painted a dark  _ blue.) _

Harry peered out the living room window. Children ran around the front lawn of Number 4, and an extremely frazzled Petunia unpacked the car. Neither Dudley nor Vernon were anywhere in sight. 

“So loud,” Bakura grumbled behind him, and Harry jumped. He hadn’t heard him approach at all. “But that’s okay. Some screaming can be fun.”

Bakura grinned down at him, the shape of the scar on his cheek deforming with the expression. Harry smiled back. Screaming  _ did _ seem like fun. 

“I guess I should send you back,” Bakura said, continuing to watch the chaos out the window. “Oh, but if I make your aunt come for you, I can squeeze a few more pounds out of her, can’t I?”

Bakura tugged back his shoulders and rolled his neck, like he was weighing the pros and cons of keeping Harry for a few more minutes. At Number 4, a car rolled up to collect their screaming child. 

Harry did not want to go back to Number 4. “I’ll go clean up your cards,” he volunteered. 

“Go for it,” Bakura said, like he didn’t care either way. 

When Petunia finally showed up to collect Harry, she had obviously taken the time to re-pin her hair and calm herself down. Her impressive neck craned to stare over Bakura’s shoulder into the house even as she argued with him over if his payment should be rounded to the nearest hour or quarter hour. 

Because he figured whatever Dudley had done would get him a few days in his cupboard anyway, as a farewell to Bakura, Harry dared to say, “The game shop in Epsom is hiring.”

Bakura blinked down at him, obviously surprised. 

“Harry,” Petunia hissed, “don’t be so presumptuous.”

She grabbed his arm and pulled him away, stomping all the way back to Number 4. 

Inside, the house was a concert of Dudley’s various screams and wails. When he paused for breath, Harry could hear Vernon lecturing him about how  _ of course _ Dudley didn’t _ actually _ want his card game. Only degenerates and uncultured delinquents played at “freak” games. 

“Cupboard,” Petunia said curtly. Harry went obediently. 

Normally when confined to his cupboard, Harry entertained himself with a handful of Dudley’s “lost” action figures he kept hidden under his mattress, or sometimes with a book from his school library when class was in session. Today, though, listening to his family have a meltdown was much more entertaining. 

Petunia and Vernon had obviously not realized the degree to which witches and wizards permeated Duel Monsters until it was too late. Based on their cajoling, it sounded like Dudley had not actually been very good at the strategy-heavy game and hadn’t enjoyed it at all. Still, he saw the cards as his, and his parents trying to take it away caused the biggest tantrum Harry had ever heard from his cousin. 

“BUT I LIKE THE ROBOT CARDS,” Dudley bellowed. 

“Wouldn’t you rather play with one of your real robots, instead?” Petunia simpered. “Like the remote control racecars mummy and daddy got you–”

Eventually Dudley’s rage was subdued with the promise of pizza for dinner and a future shopping trip for “better,  _ real _ toys, not like these silly cards and holograms.”

Harry was not invited out of his cupboard for Dudley’s birthday dinner, although he could hear the loudest of Dudley’s greedy chewing all the way from his cupboard. While Petunia was serving leftover cake, Vernon (who had, as far as Harry could tell by the slur, consumed several drinks) went on a rant about “that freak boy” being a bad influence on their “delightful Dudders.”

Harry hadn’t even been the one who brought up the cards to Dudley.

“One more year,” Vernon ranted, “and then we can send him off to delinquent school–”

Harry didn’t really know what delinquent school was, but he was happy Dudley was unlikely to be there. Delinquent friends were better than no friends. 

Hours later, when the house was quiet again, Petunia knocked on the cupboard door. 

“Dinner,” she said. “Be quiet about it.”

Harry was allowed two slices of vegetarian pizza– obviously part of Petunia’s order, since Dudley and Vernon would never willingly put green things on their pizza. While he ate, Petunia sat across from him, sipping chamomile tea and glaring fiercely. 

“Well,” she eventually said in a very tight voice. “What was it like?”

Harry paused, pizza halfway to his mouth. “Pardon?” he asked. 

“The  _ house,” _ Petunia clarified. “What was it like? Are they renovating?”

It was unusual for Petunia to show this much interest in Harry, but he was occasionally a good-albeit-regrettable source of gossip. Harry described what he saw of the house, from the mostly empty fridge to the mismatched furniture to the stained carpet. 

“They didn’t replace the carpet?” Petunia asked, sounding scandalized. “It was disgusting when I toured the house! What did they do about the accent wall?”

“You mean the blue wall?” Harry asked. “Nothing, really.”

Petunia went on a rant about the challenges of decorating a home around an accent wall, to which Harry nodded along but did not listen very hard. When Harry said they had no photos or artwork to speak of, she actually gasped in shock. 

For his efforts, Harry was rewarded with the smallest slice of Dudley’s cake. Really, the day had gone rather well for Harry. 

xXx

The Dursley continued to blame Harry for corrupting Dudley with an interest in card games, and so Harry spent several days in his cupboard, just as predicted. It wasn’t the worst punishment he’d ever gotten– he was still allowed out several hours a day for chores, and Petunia let him eat in the kitchen once Vernon and Dudley were done.

(Once, when he’d somehow ended up on the school roof, she’d made him eat crackers and cheese in his cupboard for dinner for a whole week.)

On the third day of his punishment, Harry was taking out the rubbish and found Dudley’s duel disk in his bin. Based on his eavesdropping, Harry thought Dudley had broken it in a fit when he’d lost his first game. 

Harry had never seen a duel disk before, but the odd machine in the bin didn’t look broken. There were no wires sticking out, or any obvious places where a part had broken off. Harry figured something must have gone wrong in the internal electronics when Dudley had thrown it at the ground. 

(At least, Harry assumed that’s how the duel disk had ended up broken. Dudley was very good at hurling things at the ground, as he had lots of practice.)

Harry paused, squatting over the rubbish bin, and listened for where the rest of his family was in the house. Vernon was at work, and the blare of the TV told Harry Dudley was occupied. He took several tentative steps out of Dudley’s bedroom and towards the stairs, and finally caught the sound of Petunia gossiping on the kitchen phone. 

Duel disk in hand, Harry tiptoed down the stairs and opened his cupboard as quietly as possible. His mattress took up most of the space, but there was a broken suitcase at the foot of it that he used to store his clothes. Pulling up a pile of oversized shirts, Harry buried the duel disk under them. Petunia and Vernon  _ never _ went through his clothes. 

He went back to gathering rubbish, and Petunia didn’t seem to notice a thing. 

Harry’s punishment finally ended the next Saturday, and Petunia took one look at him over breakfast and declared his hair was out of control. 

Harry petted at it uselessly. “I brushed it,” he promised, and he had. 

Petunia clicked her tongue. After breakfast, she ordered him into the upstairs bathroom.

Dudley’s hair was what Petunia called “cornsilk”– light and blonde and easily coaxed into place. Petunia did her son’s hair every morning with a comb and a spray bottle of completely unnecessary detangler. 

Every once in a while (and today was one of these unfortunate  _ whiles), _ she tried the same trick on Harry’s hair. With a pinched look on her face the whole way, she’d mist him generously with the detangler and then yank a comb through his hair until she got so frustrated she gave up. 

Today, the battle took half a bottle of detangler, and it left Harry’s scalp raw and his hair with an uncomfortable sticky wetness. The detangler at least smelled nice. 

“I’m sick of this,” Petunia finally announced. “I’m going to take care of this mess once and for all.”

She ordered him back into the kitchen, and then went to work cutting all his hair off with a pair of kitchen scissors. There was no mirror in the kitchen, but Dudley laughed hysterically at the end result. 

Vernon snorted derisively at Harry’s new look, and then ordered him out of the house so the family could have some “peace and quiet.” Although it was blistering hot, Harry preferred to be outside and away from any kitchen scissors.

He made for the wooded area behind his school, since it promised more shade than the nearby park, and there was no risk of any of his schoolmates seeing the unfortunate state of his hair. He remembered the huge mushroom ring he’d found last week, and he wanted to see if anymore mushrooms had bloomed. 

The breeze on his exposed scalp did feel nice on such a hot day, Harry thought, although it felt uneven, leading him to the worrisome conclusion that his haircut had been quite patchy. 

There weren’t any new mushrooms in the ring, as far as Harry could tell, although the caps had all curled up and turned a darker shade of brown. He remembered learning in one of his classes that mushrooms were all one big mushroom underground, and he thought about digging them up to see if that was true. 

Petunia would probably scold him if he came home dirty, though. Perhaps if he found a tool to dig with…

Some time later, Harry had found a large stick, and he was just about to start digging when Bakura clamored out of the underbrush. 

“Hello!” Harry greeted, immediately brightening. 

“What–” Bakura started, looking taken aback. “What happened to your  _ hair?” _

Harry felt his face go hot. “My aunt said it was out of control…”

Bakura laughed at him, and even though it was sharp and mean, it didn’t upset Harry the way Dudley’s laugh had. Harry’s plight was funny to Bakura, but unlike when Dudley made fun of him, Harry didn’t think Bakura’s laughter had anything to do with Harry being  _ Harry.  _

“What are you doing in the woods, anyway?” Harry asked. 

“The woods…?” Bakura said, looking around with a tone of bemusement. There was nowhere you could stand in the area where you couldn’t see a building through the trees, which Harry supposed fell outside of Bakura’s personal definition of woods. 

Still, having never been to actual woods beyond a hiking field trip for school a year ago, Harry felt his little strip of trees and bushes were very woods-like. 

“It’s a short-cut from the bus stop,” Bakura said. “I got a job at that game shop in Epsom.”

Harry beamed at him. Harry didn’t get to help other people very often, unless you counted doing Dudley’s laundry for him. It felt nice. 

“That’s great,” Harry said lamely.

“What are  _ you _ doing?” Bakura asked, raising his eyebrows. “I thought you people didn’t go into those?”

He pointed at the mushrooms at Harry’s feet. Harry blinked down at them. 

“What do you mean?” Harry asked. Were they poisonous mushrooms?

“The mushroom ring,” Bakura clarified. “Don’t you people think they’re like– cursed or something?”

“Oh,” Harry said, and then very carefully stepped out of the circle of mushrooms. He had heard something like that, maybe, in a fairytale. He wasn’t sure. “I don’t know. My aunt and uncle never talk about magic.”

“Right, right,” Bakura said, eyeing him critically. “You said that. It’s for  _ degenerates.” _

Harry nodded, suddenly feeling very awkward and stupid in Bakura’s eyes. He shifted nervously. He was still holding a stick, and he felt rather silly about it. Bakura’s gaze spent an awful long time on his forehead, and Harry suddenly felt deeply embarrassed about his new haircut and wished for his hair back. 

After several very long moments of staring, a grin broke across Bakura’s face and he took a conspiratory step towards Harry. 

“Want to hear a secret?” Bakura asked. “Magic _ is _ real, and it’s used almost  _ exclusively _ by degenerates.”

Harry had no idea what to make of that, but it made Bakura tilt his head back and cackle, and so he just smiled back. 

“C’mon,” Bakura said, gesturing for Harry to follow him out of the woods. “I’ll buy you some candy or something.”

Harry rushed to follow him, in such a hurry that he nearly forgot to drop his stick. He did remember that his school was constantly hiring speakers to tell him not to follow strangers promising him candy, so he thought to ask:

“Er– sorry– but why are you buying me candy?”

Bakura slowed his pace ever so slightly to let Harry catch up. “You told me about that job,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. 

“O-oh, right,” Harry answered. “Um– you’re welcome!”

Bakura just grunted. 

Bakura led Harry to a convenience store that was part of a petrol station and told him to pick out whatever “disgusting snack” he wanted, then turned to a display of collectible game pieces and ignored Harry. 

Left alone, Harry suddenly felt very guilty letting Bakura buy stuff for him. He picked out the cheapest candybar he could find, and then stood awkwardly at Bakura’s side while he spun the wire display around.

“Do kids at your school play this?” Bakura asked, holding up a plastic box that said it contained pieces for  _ Dungeon Dice Monsters. _

“I’ve never heard of it,” Harry said, not that he’d know what other kids played. He was rarely allowed to join. 

“What about this?” Bakura asked, and then held up a capsule for something called  _ Capsule Monsters.  _

“I don’t know,” Harry said honestly. 

Bakura sighed dramatically and said, “Fat load of good you are. I’m supposed to figure out what games local kids like.”

For a moment, Harry felt panicked that Bakura had decided he didn’t actually like him, but then Bakura paid for his candy bar. Feeling more confident his new– friend?– wasn’t going to drop him, Harry felt his fear slip into annoyance. 

“Then ask kids at the game shop,” Harry said, following Bakura out of the store. “You know, since those will be the ones who  _ actually play games.” _

Bakura snickered. “Genius idea, kid,” he said. 

When they reached Privet Drive, Harry finally got up the nerve to ask Bakura something that had the potential to get him in massive amounts of trouble. 

“So, um,” Harry started. “My cousin got a– he got one of those duel disks for his birthday.”

“Uh huh,” Bakura said, sounding bored. 

“And he broke it,” Harry continued, and Bakura looked down at him, unimpressed. “He threw it out but I– er– I rescued it.”

Bakura stopped walking, his mean grin spreading over his face. “You mean you stole it, Harry,” he said, like it was the greatest joke in the world. 

Harry suddenly became very aware of the sweat on his back from the hot sun. 

“Well,” Harry started, “it was in the rubbish–”

Bakura just laughed at him.

“It’s okay,” Bakura said finally. “I don’t judge petty theft. Or grand larceny, even.”

“Uh, okay,” Harry said, unsure what to make of that. “Anyway, do you think there’s a way to fix it?”

Bakura thought about it for a moment. “How broken is it?”

Harry explained. Bakura shrugged. 

“I might be able to find someone who can fix it,” Bakura said. With a sly quirk of his lips, he added, “Sneak it over to my place, little thief.”

They parted ways at Bakura’s mailbox. 

That evening, Vernon pulled out the grill he used about once a summer and made a very big deal about hosting a barbecue. They invited a family from two blocks over that had a son Dudley’s age, and while everyone was admiring Petunia’s geraniums in the front lawn, Harry dumped the duel disk over the fence in the back lawn. 

Vernon made the fire in the grill using Dudley’s duel monsters cards. Watching him while holding a plate of uncooked sausages, Harry couldn’t help but feel offended. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epsom is a town name taken somewhat randomly from the Wikipedia article on Surrey. 
> 
> Vernon is lucky his new neighbor isn't Atem, otherwise he might find himself spontaneously mind-crushed for burning cards. ;)
> 
> The actual plot will hopefully start to pick up next chapter. :) That you for all for you kind comments, kudos, and bookmarks so far!!


	4. birds of a feather play card games together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bakura makes a discovery, and he and the Ishtars come to some conclusions ranging from "slightly wrong" to "frighteningly correct."

There was something  _ very _ weird about Harry from Number 4, and it was driving Bakura nuts.

It was something that just wasn’t quite  _ right, _ although he couldn’t put his finger on it. Malik– who’d been the one to bring it up in the first place– just shrugged it off as children being weirdos in general. 

Bakura liked puzzles, though. He liked hidden clues, and carefully untangling traps and tricks and mysteries. He was going to solve Harry’s mystery, whether the kid wanted him to or not. 

...right after he found a job. 

Bakura found the name of a game shop in Epsom in the phonebook and called them, saying he’d heard they were hiring. They were, and Bakura was told to come over with his CV and references as soon as possible. 

“I’m sure Yugi will give you a reference,” Ishizu said mildly when Bakura said where he was going. 

“Shut up,” Bakura snarled back at her. 

Name dropping the King of Games would probably get him considered at any respectable game shop, but that didn’t mean he was going to do it. He’d rather use Yugi’s grandfather’s game shop as a fake place of employment. 

...which he  _ also _ wasn’t going to do. He showed up at the game shop without a CV. 

“I just moved from abroad,” he said, which was true. “You wouldn’t be able to verify any of my work experience anyway.”

This was, technically, also true. 

“But you’re… legal, right?” the shop’s owner– an overweight, middle-aged man who smelled of cigarettes– said, squinting at Bakura. 

Bakura rolled his eyes. “Obviously,” he said, reaching for his back pocket to procure his ID. “Got a work visa and everything.”

Bakura’s entire identity was forged, of course, as Bakura had spent the last three thousand years as a disembodied spirit. Malik had pulled some strings with the last of his criminal empire to create  _ Bakura Akefia, _ modern Egyptian citizen. 

His work visa was legitimate, though. There might have been some bribery and blackmail from Malik involved to push it through, but the actual documentation was real. 

The owner, whose name was Paul, accepted this at face value without checking Bakura’s ID, nodding seriously. The rest of the interview was spent talking about games, which Bakura obviously aced. 

“We might need to work on your customer service voice,” Paul said, “but you’ve got the knowledge. Leave me your number and I’ll call you back.”

Paul seemed very concerned about the legality of hiring an immigrant (which was ridiculous), but he also seemed desperate for someone who knew what they were talking about. Bakura gave him the Ishtar’s home number and bussed back to Little Whinging. 

Over the next couple days, Bakura spent more time than he would like to admit spying on Number 4, looking for Harry. Mostly he just caught the housewife doing her own spying back on them. 

He only saw Harry a handful of times, scrubbing the kitchen counters and taking out the rubbish; nothing gave away that there was anything off about him at all. The only strange thing Bakura noted was that Harry didn’t eat with the rest of his family. 

“It’s not that weird,” Malik said. “My father didn’t let Rishid eat with us, ‘cause he wasn’t blood related.”

Bakura gave him a very odd look. 

“Hmm,” Malik said, turning back to his bulky laptop. “You’re right. Everything my father did  _ was _ crazy bullshit.”

Malik clacked away at the keyboard. In an attempt to not be a crime lord anymore, he’d opened an online Duel Monsters trading center. A large number of cards being traded were actually his illegal copies he was slowly selling off, but Bakura was forbidden from mentioning this near Ishizu. 

(Ishizu had to know already, anyway. There was no other explanation for why Rishid was currently running all over the world organizing “trades.”)

Two days after his interview, Paul called Bakura back to tell him he was hired. Their discussion of Bakura’s pay and work schedule was punctuated by Paul rambling about tax forms for foreigners. 

Paul’s shop was very nice and cozy with a good game selection, and Bakura was looking forward to spending time there. He was not looking forward to spending time with Paul himself. 

“Congratulations,” Ishizu told him over dinner, “you’re a contributing member of society.”

“You sound like the horse next door,” Malik snickered. 

Ishizu pursed her lips ever so slightly. “Don’t call her that. It’s rude.”

_ “She’s _ rude,” Bakura said, and Ishizu didn’t have a counterargument. 

There was one other employee at the game shop, a redheaded woman in her late twenties named Joanna. She spent the coming days training Bakura, as well as rambling about her D&D group. She was… a little too noisy for Bakura’s tastes. He had to work hard to hold himself back from snapping at her. It felt oddly like pretending to be Ryou again, except less fun because the only endgame to the con was a measly paycheck.

“What about you?” she asked. “You said you liked Duel Monsters, right?”

“Yeah,” Bakura said. “I like tabletop RPGs more though, I think.”

Joanna perked up. “Oh, really? I love…”

She rambled some more, not even really paying attention to Bakura as he went back to organizing a display of action figures. 

This shop had a lot of Monster World paraphernalia. Monster World had started as Ryou’s thing, but Bakura had definitely grown a soft spot for it. An extremely traitorous part of him felt a wave of nostalgia for playing it with Ryou’s friends. He liked the dramatics of the storytelling, the slow playout of challenges and riddles, the look of despair and horror on Ryou’s friend’s faces when they realized what they’d walked into… 

“Well?” Joanna asked, interrupting his thoughts.

“Could you repeat that?” Bakura asked in his stupid Ryou-voice. 

“I asked if you found anyone to play with here yet,” Joanna said. “I have to go all the way to Sutton for my group, so if you find anyone more local–”

Bakura tuned her back out again. 

One Saturday, walking back home from the bus stop after a morning shift, Bakura found Harry standing in a ring of mushrooms, holding a stick like– like– like some sort of goddamn  _ wizard.  _

He also had the stupidest haircut Bakura had seen in his life, and he’d met Yugi Mutou and his friends. The kid started explaining, yet again, that his family had some sort of grudge against the very concept of magic, when the weird thing about Harry suddenly hit Bakura. 

It was the scar. 

Not the having of the scar, obviously _ – _ Bakura had seen flashes of it before, through Harry’s fringe. But with his hair all chopped off, the scar was on full display, all jagged and white against Harry’s olive skin, and Bakura instinctively knew it was the source of Harry’s weirdness.

That was a cursed scar, if Bakura had ever seen one. 

_ Interesting, _ he thought. Outloud, he offered to buy Harry a snack. 

xXx

“What do you think?” Ishizu asked, modeling a pencil skirt and blazer set in the living room.

“I think your colleagues were shitting themselves over you looking like ancient priestess 24/7,” Malik replied. “Doesn’t that help sell your expertise?” 

Bakura kept his mouth shut, sitting back in his armchair and leafing through a new edition Monster World players’ manual he’d “borrowed” from work. Malik was definitely the one most into fashion in the room, and he debated with Ishizu the pros and cons of modernizing her style for work purposes. 

(Malik’s cargo pants and crop tops and excessive jewelry were obviously compensation for years of wearing whatever ugly garb tombkeepers wore. Ishizu… was cut from the same cloth as Malik, and wore just as much ridiculous gold and ran around making equally dramatic speeches.)

Bakura didn’t even think Ishizu’s normal get-up looked that much like an ancient priestess. He would know. He was there. 

“What on earth?” Ishizu suddenly said, moving towards the window. 

A duel disk had been chucked over the fence from Number 4 into their mess of weeds they called a lawn. Bakura snorted, and explained Harry’s theft. 

“Cute,” Ishizu said blandly. “We don’t  _ actually _ want the neighbors to hate us, Bakura.”

“But we already hate them,” Malik whined. “I always wanted to have neighbor drama, back when we could only dream of even having neighbors–”

“You did  _ not,” _ Ishizu countered, her nostrils flaring ever so slightly.

Bakura didn’t hear the rest of the argument. He got up to collect the duel disk. He could bully Malik into finding a way to fix it later. 

The next day, Harry was sent outside to mow the lawn, a task no one at Number 6 had ever considered doing. All the kid’s hair had grown back, as wild and unkept as ever. 

_ What the HELL? _ Bakura thought, and then marched outside to wave the kid down. 

“I want to show you something,” Bakura said, jabbing a thumb at his own house. “Come inside.”

Harry shot a nervous look at Number 4. 

“I’m doing chores,” he said. 

“So?” Bakura said. “Just tell them I kidnapped you. They’ll believe you.”

“They’ll still blame  _ me,” _ Harry said indignantly. He went back to pushing the mower.

Bakura felt his temper spike and then squished it down again. He’d always been good at waiting. He could be patient. 

“Come over when you have free time, then,” he said. “Preferably at night,” he added, because that would guarantee both he and Ishizu would be home, and he wanted as many second opinions as possible. 

Harry showed up Thursday evening, a half-eaten sandwich in hand. 

“It’s their movie night,” he said, “so I can stay for a while before they notice. What did you want to show me?”

Bakura had, of course, lied about having something to show Harry. He wanted to show Harry to the Ishtar siblings. 

Harry looked deeply confused when Bakura called Ishizu and Malik in, although Bakura had poured him a glass of cola to go with his sandwich, and Harry refrained from complaining. 

“Harry, show us your scar,” Bakura commanded. 

Harry looked even more confused, but he obligingly pushed his hair back. 

“Okay,” Malik said slowly, turning to Bakura. “So he has a scar. Big deal.”

_ “Look _ at it,” Bakura hissed, gesturing fiercely towards Harry. 

Frowning, Ishizu bent over the boy. She lifted a hand to touch his forehead, but then let it rest on the table instead. 

“Oh my,” she concluded. 

“Um,” Harry said. “What’s so interesting about my scar? Isn’t Bakura’s a bit– you know– cooler?”

Bakura reflexively brushed his fingers against his own facial scar, and then desperately prayed to every god he could think of that Malik hadn’t noticed. 

“Nothing about Bakura is cool,” Malik said, moving forward to also lean over Harry and stare at his scar. After a moment, he declared:  _ “Huh.” _

“That’s a bit,” Ishizu started and then stopped, biting her lip. 

“A bit  _ freaky soul magicky?” _ Bakura suggested. 

“Harry,” Malik said, voice and body suddenly tense. “Where did you get your scar?”

Malik, Bakura knew, had a lot of feelings about scars. God forgive Harry’s shitty family if  _ they _ were the ones who carved a magic scar into a child, because Malik would lose his shit. 

“In a car crash when I was a baby,” Harry said, jamming the last of his sandwich into his mouth. His hand was still holding his fringe back, and he sounded very nonchalant as he added, “The one that killed my parents.”

Malik relaxed. 

“Are you sure, Harry?” Ishizu asked, her brows furrowed. Bakura could practically hear her brain wishing she still had her Necklace. Hell, he wished he still had his Ring, or the Eye even. Bakura and the Ishtars all still had a bit of magic in them, but the Millennium Items made using it  _ so _ much easier.

“I– I mean,” Harry stuttered. “That’s what my aunt and uncle told me. Why would they lie?”

_ Because magic is for degenerates,  _ Bakura thought, and suddenly he could feel pieces of the puzzle fitting together. He still couldn’t quite see the shape of the final picture, but he was definitely getting there. 

“What happened to your hair?” Bakura asked, crossing his arms. Both the Ishtars turned to give him peculiar looks. 

“Oh, it grew back overnight,” Harry said, as calmly as if he were explaining what he’d learned in school that day. He dropped his fringe and reached for his glass of cola. “Odd stuff like that always happens to me.”

“Odd stuff?” Bakura prompted. Malik and Ishizu appeared to be having a silent conversation over Harry’s head with just their eyes. 

“Hmm, yeah, like once my teacher’s hair turned blue,” Harry said. “And sometimes weirdly dressed strangers greet me on the street.”

He drained the glass of cola. Malik mouthed  _ What the fuck? _ at Bakura.

“If you’re not actually going to show me anything,” Harry asked, glancing around the room, “can I go home? I really will get in trouble for being over here.”

“Beat it, then,” Bakura told him. 

Harry slid off his chair and trotted out of the room. Malik watched him go as if Harry had spontaneously transformed into a deer and pranced off. 

When the front door slammed shut, both Ishtars turned to Bakura, eyes wide. 

“So,” Malik said very slowly and with the air of someone who was roughly 70% sure they were hallucinating, “that kid does have a soul sealed in his forehead, right?”

“I think it’s only part of a soul,” Bakura said. He was an expert at peeling off part of a soul and slapping it into something else for safe keeping. It was the oldest trick in the book. 

“But why would it affect people’s hair? I’ve never heard of soul magic doing  _ that,” _ Ishizu observed, tapping her chin and frowning. 

Soul magic was the oldest and deepest magic known to man, so Bakura didn’t think it wasn’t too out of the realm of possibility for someone to at some point try to use it on hair. Besides– 

“I don’t know, did you  _ meet _ the pharaoh?” Malik pointed out, voicing Bakura’s opinion. “I want to know how it got there in the first place. Is it affecting him? Does he have a  _ you, _ Bakura?”

Malik gave Bakura a very accusatory look, as if Malik didn’t have his own extra-evil alter ego. 

Bakura frowned, turning the evidence over in his mind. Maybe Harry did have a  _ him, _ and it was a bit of a prankster…? That would explain the hair magic and how Harry’s family blamed him for things out of his control, but not the odd strangers greeting him. And it certainly gave no clues as to how the soul fragment had gotten there to begin with, or for what purpose. 

“Maybe,” Bakura said, “we should ask it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things! Are! Happening!
> 
> I'm not sure where "Akefia" came from as a (fanon?) name for TKB, but I've included it as his fake surname, lol.
> 
> I've updated the expected chapter length to match my outline. I rarely make chapter-by-chapter outlines, so we'll see how closely I stick to this plan. Alternating POVs for each chapter is also a bit of an experiment on my end. I'm trying really hard not to just repeat scenes unless there's something relevant going on with the other character!


	5. here there be duel monsters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry has a birthday and plays a card game.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been trying to aim for chapters around 2.5k words in length, but _somehow_ this one ended up twice as long despite my outline only containing two plot points. I hope this doesn't continue to be a trend because I only have so many hours in my day, LMAO.

Two weeks into July, Petunia dropped Harry off at the Ishtar house while she took Dudley and Piers out for the day. 

“Try to see upstairs,” she whispered to Harry right before she knocked on the door. 

Malik was the one to answer, looking groggy with his usually immaculate hair mussed. Harry suspected he’d been woken from a nap. 

“Bakura’s in the kitchen,” Malik told him, then slouched up the stairs. 

Bakura was indeed in the kitchen, reading a book with a picture of a dragon on it. In front of him on the table was what looked like one of Dudley’s playsets from when he went through a Lego phase: a tiny world with mountains and rivers and a little castle. 

Bakura grunted out an acknowledgement of Harry’s presence instead of saying real words. Harry approached the table, standing on tiptoes to lean over it. It was very intricate, although there were patches of bare plastic where it looked like Bakura was missing pieces of the set. 

“Did you get this from your work?” Harry asked. 

Bakura grunted again, which Harry interpreted as a ‘yes.’ 

“Is it a game?” Harry asked. Bakura didn’t answer for a few seconds, then snapped the book shut. 

“Yes,” he said. “It’s called  _ Monster World. _ I used to play it with– with my old roommate.”

Harry nodded along while Bakura explained it. It was an adventure game, where the players got to make up their own story as they went. He thought he was a bit old for make-believe games (and he wasn’t nearly as old as Bakura), but Bakura sounded genuinely enthusiastic when he talked about it, so maybe it was fun after all. 

“Can we play it?” Harry asked when Bakura was done. 

“Hmm, well, you need more than two players…” Bakura trailed off thoughtfully, staring down at his playset. “Anyway, I’m not done building my board.”

“Oh,” said Harry, trying not to feel disappointed. 

“You said you’re turning ten this month, right?” Bakura asked suddenly, and Harry was surprised he remembered that. 

“On the thirty-first,” Harry confirmed. 

Bakura nodded, still staring at his playset. “I think it’ll be ready by then.”

“Your board?”

“No,” Bakura huffed, turning his face to Harry, all the usual sharp meanness back in his demeanor. “Your duel disk. Remember, little thief?”

Bakura had sent it away somewhere, to a man Malik knew who knew about how to repair them. It made Harry’s chest feel all warm to hear Bakura had gone out of his way to do something for him, even if it was just posting his duel disk to someone else to fix it. 

“That’ll be fun,” Harry told him, head filled with anticipation. “I’ve never had a real birthday present before!”

Bakura froze in the middle of opening his book again. “You–  _ never?” _

Wrong answer. This was definitely the sort of thing adults went on to ask Harry’s aunt and uncle about, and then Harry was inevitably punished for it later. 

“W-well,” Harry stuttered out, “I mean, I get presents, of course– but it’s usually– just clothes…”

He finished lamely, hoping Bakura would accept his answer. He did usually receive second-hand clothes for his birthday and Christmas, so it wasn’t like he was lying. Bakura, to his dismay, looked mildly disgusted. 

“You got  _ that,” _ Bakura said, gesturing at Harry’s whole outfit, “as a birthday present?”

“They’re Dudley’s…” Harry said vaguely, tugging at the hem of his shirt. He knew he looked ridiculous in Dudley’s hand-me-downs, but Bakura didn’t have to say it like  _ that.  _

“HEY, MALIK,” Bakura yelled, making Harry jump, and Malik stuck his head (hair now brushed into place) into the kitchen. “You have the saddest backstory I’ve heard from someone in the modern era. Have you ever gotten a birthday present?”

“Yes?” Malik answered, looking confused. “We have birthdays underground too, Bakura.”

Bakura turned to Harry, eyebrows raised, as if he’d just made a point and Malik hadn’t just said something very weird and confusing.

_ “Please _ don’t ask my aunt and uncle about it,” Harry said. 

Bakura glowered at him, his mood visibly turning darker than Harry had ever seen. 

“Whatever,” Bakura said eventually, waving his hand like he was batting a bad idea away. “That’s not really my business, anyway.”

He stood then, stretching and rolling his shoulders. “C’mon,” Bakura said. “If you’re going to play with a duel disk, you might as well have some cards.”

Bakura led Harry upstairs. Harry kept his eyes open, scanning for any details that would scandalize Petunia. Part of him felt guilty for spying on his new friend, but if he saw something juicy enough, Petunia would definitely let him back over to investigate more. 

The cream color carpet ended at the stairs, after which the flooring was all very scuffed hardwood. The upstairs corridor had no runner rug, and Harry imagined Petunia sucking air in through her nostrils in delighted shock when he told her. 

Like the Dursley’s house, there were four bedrooms upstairs, although all four doors were closed. Bakura led Harry to what was the Dursley’s guestroom, and inside was an unmade bed with no headboard, a single dresser, and a pile of dirty laundry in the corner.

The Durlsey’s guest room was made up with Aunt Marge’s aesthetic in mind, and contained a lot of dusty pink. Harry thought Bakura’s version was an improvement. 

“Here,” Bakura said, pulling his plastic bin of cards out of the closet. “You can carry this, right?”

The bin was rather heavy, but Harry nodded without hesitation. Bakura pulled some shoeboxes out from the closet as well, and then led Harry into their backyard. 

The front garden of Number 6 was a bunch of flower beds no one was taking care of, the trailer Malik still refused to move and under which all the grass had died, and a bunch of weeds. The backyard was also a mess of out of control plants, including some very lopsided rose bushes left over from the previous owners. Vernon complained about Number 6’s lawn care constantly, and bragged about convincing neighbors into hating it too. Once he got enough neighbors on his side, he claimed he was going to complain to some sort of neighborhood organization and get the Ishtars fined. 

“I could mow it, if you want,” Harry offered, wading carefully through the ankle-high grass to the stone picnic table in the yard. 

“Why would you?” Bakura asked, dropping his shoe boxes on the table. “Who cares what the grass looks like?”

“A lot of people,” Harry muttered, although he supposed Bakura had a point. It wasn’t like it was  _ natural _ for grass to be cut. “The neighborhood association, for example.”

Bakura seemed to think getting in trouble with the neighborhood association was funny, and he snorted to himself as he started unpacking cards. 

They spent most of the rest of the day trying to make Harry a Duel Monsters deck, with a break for lunch (leftover rice and meat rubbed in spices Petunia would never dare touch), during which Malik made fun of Bakura for being overdramatic. 

“There is  _ no _ reason to use so many steps to do this,” Malik said. “You could play him right now, at the kitchen table.”

“It’s more fun this way,” Bakura said, scowling at his plate. “Also–  _ you’re _ calling  _ me _ dramatic?”

Bakura only let Harry wash half the dishes before he seemed to get impatient and shooed him back outside. 

The shoeboxes Bakura brought out contained what he referred to as “the good cards.” Harry didn’t really see any difference at all, except that Bakura would have six or seven copies of the cards in the big bin and only one or two or three of the shoebox cards. 

“Stop just looking at the pictures,” Bakura said, sounding annoyed. “Here– what does the effect of this card say?”

Harry read the effect for Cyber Jar outloud, which was very long and complicated but started with destroying all monsters on the field. 

“See?” said Bakura, tapping his fingers on the table. “That’s a really powerful effect.”

“I guess…” Harry said, frowning down at the card. He still didn’t like the picture. 

“Let’s try a different strategy,” Bakura said, shoving a box at Harry. “Pick a strong monster card you like, and we’ll make a deck around it.”

Harry picked out something called Dark Magician. 

“Absolutely not,” Bakura said, and tossed the card back into the box. 

“But I  _ like _ the spellcaster cards,” Harry complained, and then immediately checked over his shoulder to make sure Petunia hadn’t gotten back home without them noticing and was spying over the fence. 

Bakura leaned back in his chair, pinching the bridge of his nose.  _ “I know,” _ he stressed. “But I’m not helping you make a Dark Magician deck.”

Harry had to press very hard and be very stubborn about not looking at other cards to get an answer, but eventually Bakura grumbled out something about the world champion using a Dark Magician deck.

“But doesn’t that mean it’s good?” Harry asked.

“It means people who try to copy him are unoriginal  _ idiots,” _ Bakura snapped.

Harry pouted. 

“Let’s try a theme then,” Bakura said after taking a deep, calming breath. “What do you like to do Harry, besides being an exhausting playmate?”

Harry opened his mouth to answer, then closed it. What  _ did _ he like to do? It wasn’t like he was allowed much in the way of hobbies.

“I like things my aunt and uncle don’t,” Harry said eventually. He’d never say that within earshot of his family, of course, or at school, or even to Mrs. Figg. But it seemed like an admission that Bakura could take in stride. 

True to form, Bakura snorted with laughter. When he’d calmed he said, “Kid, that’s pathetic, but we can work with it.”

Bakura teased and coaxed a list of things the Dursley didn’t like out of Harry. Magic, of course. Anything they thought of as “funny business.” Petunia despised untidiness and Vernon hated freelance workers. Dudley hated vegetables and Harry. 

_ “You’re _ certainly not a card,” Bakura said, sounding amused. 

Bakura decided on a fairy deck. Harry wrinkled his nose at the idea at first– fairies seemed distinctly girly– but fairy cards had all sorts of cool monsters, including things that looked like magicians and angels.

“I’ve always wanted to fly,” Harry said, looking down at a monster called Darklord Asmodeus, which had dark purple wings. 

“What?” Bakura asked, frowning down at a different card, “In a plane? It’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds.”

“No, I mean…” Harry trailed off, and Bakura raised his eyebrows at him like he’d said something particularly silly. “If it were possible for a person, is all I meant. It’s stupid.”

Bakura hummed and didn’t agree or disagree with him. 

Assembling the deck and deciding on strategy was mostly Bakura’s work, which he did with brows furrowed and occasionally hissing at Harry to be quiet while he concentrated. When it was all together, he tried explaining it to Harry, but it all seemed mind-numbingly complicated. 

“I thought the point was just to summon strong monsters?” Harry asked.

For a moment, the frustration on Bakura’s face was so apparent that Harry was afraid he was going to yell at him. Harry was used to adults yelling at him, of course, but he’d thought Bakura to be different. 

Bakura seemed to shrug his irritation off, though, and he tried a different approach. 

“Think of it like a story,” he said. “You get those in school, right, even if your aunt and uncle are whackjobs?”

Bakura told Harry to think of the magic cards and effect monsters like steps on a quest. King Arthur’s story wasn’t just pulling a sword out of a stone, after all. There were magicians and prophecies and knights all running around, analogous to how Harry should use his cards to clear the way and help out his more powerful monsters. Harry nodded along like he knew the story of King Arthur, which probably came up a few times in school but not in the sort of detail that Bakura was talking about. 

When the sun started to set and Harry’s stomach started to growl with hunger, Malik trudged out of the house. 

“You don’t actually need a seventeen step plan to victory, no matter what this idiot says,” Malik drawled, pulling at Bakura shaggy white hair. Bakura swatted his hand out of the way. 

“It’s more  _ fun _ like this,” Bakura snapped. “Some of us learned patience.”

“If you want a kid to have fun, just give him a bunch of strong monsters,” Malik said, having apparently read Harry’s mind. He leaned over the cards spread out all over the table. “Isn’t the point that he loses, anyway?”

“Hey!” Harry protested. Bakura also snarled and shoved Malik, although Harry was not under the illusion that Bakura was defending Harry’s dueling skills. 

“I said we’re doing this  _ my _ way,” Bakura griped. 

“Whatever,” Malik said, rolling his eyes. “I came out to tell you horse-face is back, anyway. She said to send Harry over.”

Malik left, and Bakura watched critically as Harry gathered up all the cards, correcting him when he tried to put them away in the wrong boxes. 

“What should I do with this?” Harry asked, holding up the deck they’d made. 

Bakura flashed his teeth at him. “What do you think? It’s yours. Don’t get it confiscated.”

Harry shoved the deck down his trousers. Dudley’s baggy t-shirt hid any bulkiness. Bakura, who walked him to the door of Number 4 in order to collect his payment, snickered the whole way. 

xXx

On his tenth birthday, Harry found a parcel on the kitchen table wrapped in newspaper. 

“We expect gratitude, boy,” Vernon said, slapping it. 

Harry opened it to find two of Dudley’s shirts, a sweater Dudley had stained with gravy, a package of new underwear, and a rock. 

“That’s from Dudders,” Vernon said proudly, nodding at the rock. 

“Er, thanks, Dudley,” Harry said, and Dudley grunted through a mouthful of bacon. 

Harry then had to go through the tedious process of thanking his aunt and uncle for their generosity in giving him gifts and letting him live under their roof. It was a very practiced speech he could give in his sleep at this point, but if Harry didn’t watch his tone, it came out highly sarcastic. 

Sometimes, sarcasm went right over the Dursleys’ head, and Harry could spend the rest of his day feeling highly vindicated. Today he wanted to go to Number 6, though, and the risk wasn’t worth it. 

He did his usual chores as quickly as possible without sacrificing completeness– Petunia would make him redo any substandard work, even on his birthday. It was “tradition” for Harry to make his own cake for his birthday, because even though his family hated him, Dudley liked any excuse to eat cake. Harry had very little actual baking skills, but he put together a four ingredient pound cake from Petunia’s recipe box while Petunia prepared an orange glaze for it. 

“Do you think,” Harry said, politely as possible once the cake was in the oven, “I could go out and play? I’ve done all my chores.”

“The cake isn’t done until it’s on the cooling rack,” Petunia said. Then she sighed and added, “Fine. I can take it out, as a favor for your birthday.”

Petunia had been a lot nicer to Harry recently, in light of him drawing a diagram of Bakura’s bedroom for her. He still felt deeply guilty about it, and when he went over to Number 6 as planned, he admitted to Bakura that he’d been trading floorplans for permission to visit. 

To his relief, that made Bakura laugh hysterically. 

“Happy birthday, Harry,” Isihizu greeted breezily, interrupting Bakura’s laughing fit. She had a full-time job and it was a bit odd that she was home in the early afternoon on a Tuesday, but Harry didn’t question it. Bakura had random weekdays off, so Harry just assumed some jobs were like that. 

Bakura disappeared out of the kitchen and when he returned, unceremoniously dropped Dudley’s duel disk on the table in front of Harry. 

“Happy birthday, little thief,” he said, and it somehow sounded more like a threat than a sincere greeting. Given Harry’s cousin had literally given him a rock this morning, though, Harry would take what he could get. 

“Thank you,” Harry said, flipping the duel disk over on the table to examine it. It looked no different from when he’d found it broken. 

There was a very awkward silence while both Ishizu and Bakura stared at Harry like they expected something to happen, and Harry debated if he should admit this and the Duel Monsters deck were the nicest things anyone had ever done for him. He couldn’t quite put together a way to express his gratitude without making his life sound horribly pathetic. 

“Oh good, he’s here,” Malik said, waltzing into the kitchen with a coffee mug. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

They all piled into Ishizu’s second-hand car, and Malik shoved Bakura roughly out of the way to claim the front seat. Bakura looked briefly very annoyed, and his body language suggested he was going to try and wrestle Malik out of the seat, but then he shrugged it off and climbed into the back next to Harry. 

“You brought your cards, right?” Bakura asked Harry while Harry buckled his seatbelt. 

“Er– yes,” Harry said. He’d very purposefully put on a pair of shorts with very deep pockets, even though the shorts had been loose on _ Dudley _ and looked extra ridiculous on Harry. 

There was a park with an open field for football and rugby nearby, which was where Dudley went for his birthday and where Harry assumed they were going to play with his duel disk. Ishizu, however, got on the motorway. Malik fiddled with the radio the whole way, changing the station every few seconds. 

Bakura, who was sitting behind Ishizu, instructed Harry to kick the back of Malik’s seat until he stopped. Harry giggled. 

“Um,” Harry said when they were still on the motorway twenty minutes later, “I don’t actually ask my aunt for permission to leave Little Whinging…”

In the rearview mirror, Ishizu’s face looked surprised, as if it hadn’t occurred to her that a child might ask permission to go somewhere. 

Harry, of course, didn’t really care if Aunt Petunia approved of what he did with the Ishtars. He was just confident he’d get a day or three shut in the cupboard if he came home late. 

Malik changed the subject by complaining that they could have just played in their backyard, but Bakura liked his  _ dramatics.  _

“You want to be spied on by neighbors?” Bakura asked snidely.

Malik let out an exaggerated sigh. “Harry, I hope he doesn’t scare you off, because you’ve basically kicked down the door to Bakura’s insane neuroticisms.”

“It’ll be fine,” Ishizu assured Harry, catching his eye in the rearview mirror. “That’s why Malik and I are coming along.”

Bakura rolled his eyes, and for the first time, Harry was a little bit worried about what he was agreeing to do. They were just playing a card game, weren’t they? Why was Ishizu trying to reassure him he'd be okay?

Ishizu finally pulled off the motorway at a place marked as a campsite. The carpark was packed dirt surrounded by trees. Bakura hopped out of the car and extracted his own duel disk from the trunk, strapping it immediately to his arm. 

“You wanted to see the woods, didn’t you?” Bakura asked, grinning at Harry and waving vaguely at the treeline. The duel disk on his arm glinted in the sun. 

Harry was very confused, but the fifteen minute walk down a mulch trail was pleasant. The underbrush of the woods was filled with huge ferns, and there were a lot more animal noises than he was used to. It all seemed rather fun, even as Bakura loudly made fun of Malik dressing up all posh to go hiking. 

It wasn’t a real hike, though, as they only went a little ways before they got to a big clearing. It was obviously for camping, dotted with rusty grills and fire pits, and even had a portable toilet. There was no sign of other campers, though, as there was a chain across the path and a sign that said the campgrounds were closed for maintenance. 

“This is perfect,” Bakura said, casually stepping over the chain. “No interruptions.”

“Er,” said Harry, but when Malik and Ishizu both walked around the posts supporting the chain, he only hesitated a couple seconds before following. 

“Malik’s going to help you with the duel disk,” Bakura said, stationing himself one one side of the clearing. Ishizu moved to somewhere in the middle at to the side, as if she were refereeing a football game. 

“Right,” Malik mumbled to himself as he ushered Harry to the opposite side of the clearing. “Let’s just jump into it and  _ not _ explain anything to the child.”

“I’ve seen it on the telly,” Harry defended himself, pulling his duel disk out from where he’d shoved it under his arm and trying to figure out how he even attached it to his arm. “I know what to expect.”

Malik gave him an oddly pitying look, then squatted down to help him with the duel disk. The disk had hologram projectors nested into it, and Harry had to position his arm in a certain way so they could be ejected at the correct angle.

“Are you sure you don’t need help?” Ishizu asked Bakura. “You haven’t done anything like this since you got your body.”

Bakura clicked his tongue in annoyance. “People played shadow games for centuries before Aknamkanon decided he needed his little items. Yes, I’m sure I can do this without your help, Tombkeeper.”

Harry, for his part, had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. He focused instead on Malik telling him that his cards would stick to the duel disk no problem via static electricity, but that also meant if he touched the display he risked shocking himself. 

“Right, thanks,” Harry told him. 

Harry looked up and across the clearing at Bakura then and nearly lost his footing. The clearing was suddenly darker and colder, even though it was barely 2pm, and something was just  _ off  _ in a way that disoriented him. 

Next to him, Harry heard the unmistakable sound of Malik smacking a hand to his own face. Bakura was grinning like a maniac. 

Harry decided not to mention the weird feeling, because this might be the only good birthday he ever got, and he wasn’t going to ruin it. 

“Do I draw?” he asked Malik. 

Malik shot him a slightly defeated look and said loud enough for Bakura to hear from across the clearing, “That  _ idiot _ needs to declare terms first.”

“You don’t have to agree to them if they’re absurd, Harry,” Ishizu interrupted. Then she sent a very cross look at Bakura. “Please recall that he is a child.”

Bakura practically cackled. “You all act like I’m a monster,” he cooed. “Here are the rules, Harry: it’s a totally normal game, but if I win, I get to meet the extra soul in your head.”

“...what?” Harry asked. He understood all those words individually, but the longer he listened to them talk, the more he felt like he was listening to someone explain the plot of a book he’d never even heard of. 

“Just say yes,” Malik said, his words muffled by the hand over his face. “As long as he doesn’t start yelling about  _ your _ soul, it’s fine.”

“Er, okay?” Harry said. Then after a beat he asked, “What if I win?”

Bakura’s grin was so wide Harry felt like he could make out all his teeth even from yards and yards away. 

“Then you can meet  _ my _ soul,” Bakura said. 

Next to Harry, Malik turned away and muttered, “Oh my god.”

“Good enough,” Ishizu declared. “Begin!”

The holograms in person were indeed the coolest thing Harry had ever seen. Most of Bakura’s cards were… well, they were really scary, but Harry didn’t mind. He’d always liked the idea of monsters and ghosts and dragons. It was exciting enough that he powered through the dizziness and nausea the woods seemed to be soliciting from him. Maybe he was allergic to something?

Harry knew the deck Bakura had designed for him was supposed to have specific strategies. He knew Bakura had explained them in-depth to him weeks ago. Harry did not remember a single one, except that this ritual card let him summon a cool monster, and this effect monster also let him summon a cool monster, and that even though Bakura said this monster was useless, it looked really cool. 

Summoning cool monsters, really, was all Harry wanted to do. In a perfect mirror of attitudes, every one of Bakura’s turns seemed to involve a complicated explanation of magic and trap cards and sending things to the graveyard and then resummoning them. There were a lot fewer cool monsters involved, and six turns later, Harry’s life points dropped to zero and he wasn’t even really sure why. 

“Huh,” Harry said, looking down at the meter displaying his life points. The nausea was bad enough he was starting to see spots and his stomach felt a little queasy. Although he was disappointed he’d lost, he was also glad the game was over. 

“Looks like you need to study more,” Bakura said, his voice mocking even though he seemed pleased with himself for winning. 

“You stood up to that a lot better than I thought you would,” Malik said, blinking down at Harry. 

“Stood up to what?” Harry asked, and then there was a suddenly splitting pain in his forehead. Harry yelped and finally felt himself lose his balance, stumbling over as the pain got so intense his vision went from dark spots to blinding light. 

The pain was gone as quickly as it started. Harry blinked up at the sky with perfectly clarity, and it was as dark as if it were night, with no stars or moon in sight. Malik’s arm was around his shoulders, propping him up. 

“Easy now,” Malik said calmly. “We’re just going to– what the  _ fuck.” _

“How unexpected,” Ishizu said, now standing a few feet from Harry. 

Bakura was now practically skipping across the field to join them, and he wolf-whistled at a weird bundle sitting where Harry had been standing for his duel. 

“Well, that’s new,” Bakura said, sounding delighted. 

Harry sat up fully, shrugging off Malik’s arm, and squinted at the bundle. It looked like a grimey blanket wrapped around the world’s ugliest baby. The baby had pale grey skin, horrible red eyes, and the ugliest, wrinkliest face Harry had ever seen. 

“What is that?” Harry asked. 

Malik’s eyebrows were raised almost to his hairline. “Your guess is as good as mine, kid.”

Bakura squatted over the weird baby. “Hello?”

The baby screamed and thrashed, although no tears escaped its eyes. Both Bakura and Ishizu tried asking it questions, but it quickly became apparent that it couldn’t speak in anything but ear-splitting, wordless shrieks. It was, afterall, a baby. 

“Why would anyone seal a baby into another baby?” Ishizu wondered, and Harry could barely hear her over the noise of the baby. 

“Maybe,” Malik said, standing from where he was crouched next to Harry. “Maybe it’s like… like the other me?”

Both Bakura and Ishizu looked thoughtful, even as the weird baby continued to scream. 

“Um, excuse me,” Harry said. “What’s going on?”

Ignoring him, Ishizu said very slowly, “It’s possible– he did say he got the scar from a traumatic event when he was a baby. Usually you’d need magic to split your soul in two like that, though.”

“Magic?” Harry repeated. 

Bakura shrugged and then stretched, pulling his shoulder back. “Well, if it’s not going to talk, there’s no point keeping it around.”

“Are you sure?” Ishizu said, frowning. “If we kept it, we could try again.”

“Fine,” Bakura said, producing a card from his pocket. “But I’m not sticking it back in the kid.”

With a bored look on his face, Bakura waved the card over the weird baby, which vanished. As soon as the baby was gone, the sun appeared back in the sky. 

Squinting in the sudden light, Harry shakily got to his feet. 

“Excuse me,” he said, louder than before, and all three adults turned to him like they were just remembering he was there. “What is going on?”

Bakura pocketed the card and grinned down at him. “Oh, did we forget to tell you? Magic is real.”

xXx

Harry spent the car ride back in dead silence, trying to process what Bakura had told him. Harry had just… accidentally participated in some sort of ancient magic ritual. That’s why he’d felt odd the whole game. The weird baby was a piece of dark magic that someone had put into him when he was a baby, that had just been  _ living inside of him _ this whole time. The Ishtars and Bakura spent the whole drive debating the point of the baby, and if it was a piece of Harry’s soul or someone else’s. Ishizu seemed very serious about it, but Bakura seemed downright thrilled by the mystery. 

Harry was starting to wonder if maybe his new friends were insane. 

Still, it would explain a  _ lot _ about his life if magic were real. Harry hoped they were right, even though the idea of having a weird gross baby living in his forehead was a little disturbing. 

When they got off the motorway in Little Whinging, Bakura suddenly turned to Harry and asked, “Is your awful family going to let you eat with them?”

“What?” Harry asked. 

“Is your terrible, awful family,” Bakura said, slowly like Harry was being a bit dim, “going to let you eat a nice, normal meal for your birthday?”

Harry didn’t quite understand the question. “I made a cake,” he tried. Having cake was what you did for birthdays, right?

Bakura rolled his eyes and leaned forward to demand Ishizu take them somewhere to eat. 

“Do  _ not _ speak to me like that, Bakura,” Ishizu snapped back, even as she turned the car towards Dudley’s favorite burger place. 

It was a bit early in the afternoon for dinner, and Malik complained they were going to have to eat with a bunch of old people, but it was still the best meal Harry had ever had. 

“This definitely makes up for summoning a weird baby out of my head,” Harry told Bakura through a mouthful of chips. 

“Well, I had to cheer myself up after that awful duel,” Bakura said, smirking at him. “Did you not pay attention to any of my advice?”

“I mean,” Harry said truthfully, “most of it was boring.”

Bakura laughed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bakura: The key to duel monsters is to make the single most convoluted strategy possible--  
> Harry: I SUMMON A COOL MONSTER!  
> Bakura: _No!_
> 
> Harry's deck archetype is one called _Darklord,_ because I couldn't resist that name. I'm not actually familiar enough with the nitty-gritty details of the game to write out a duel in detail, but the point was that Harry losing a shadow game meant they'd be able to draw out Harry's Horcrux. Except it turns out that that particular Horcrux is a weird, unhelpful baby. :(
> 
> Also! I thought I should note that updates may slow down for the foreseeable future, as I'm committed to a lot of stuff this upcoming academic year. I'm not really sure how my schedule/free-time is going to shake out, but I wanted to tell you guys that if I don't update anything for months and months, it's not abandoned! I'm just busy!!


	6. like a house (of cards) on fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just because someone is your friend doesn't mean they're not also the worst person you know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me, last week: I'm going to be super busy! I have lots of academic and professional writing I need to focus on!  
> Me, writing another chapter: Oh no. Oh heck. Oh fudge. 
> 
> This chapter spends a little bit of time worldbuilding the type of magic Bakura uses. It’s cobbled together from manga explanations of Ka/Ba and some things I’ve gathered from other fics that I don’t think are strictly canon.

The worst part of having his own body was not the necessity of feeding it, or having to bathe it, or even discovering he had a tooth cavity that needed filling. It was the amount of time Bakura had to waste on  _ completely _ pointless things. 

It wasn’t that Bakura was incapable of patience. He waited thousands of years for his revenge on the world; he could handle an eight-hour shift at the game shop without losing his mind. It was that he didn’t  _ get _ anything out of work, save a mediocre paycheck. Sleep wasted his time and had no reward except not feeling awful later. Having to fold his laundered clothes was an infuriating task, which only led to him wearing and dirtying the clothes again in a never ending laundry cycle.

(He did  _ not _ remember laundry consuming this much of his time and attention back in the day.)

Bakura knew the tedium and the lack of purpose were just part of being human. It was just that he’d very purposefully given up being human three thousand years ago, and going back to it was a special sort of torture.

The shadow games had nothing on _ laundry. _

It wasn’t all awful, of course. The Ishtars were not terrible company. Without the whispers of Zorc in his ears and in his soul, Bakura had more emotional room to properly miss his family, and he knew the Ishtars were the closest he was ever going to get to replacing them. He would never, ever admit this outloud, but he hadn’t tried to rip any of their souls out yet, so he assumed the Ishtars understood. 

Work was mostly a series of dull tasks, but he liked keeping up with gaming culture and having access to gaming paraphernalia, and every once in a while a customer said something interesting. One day a man came in, looking flustered, and said he’d checked every game shop in London for a certain Dungeon Dice Monsters dice set, and he was desperate. 

The man presented a photocopy of an advertisement in a Japanese language magazine, which he claimed he found through a webring. 

“It’s supposed to be out this week, I think it says,” he explained. Whoever had posted it had just given a vague summary, not a full translation of the text.

Bakura’s coworker Joanna bit her lip, frowning down at the sheet of computer paper, and then turned to Bakura, who was sitting behind the cash register and pretending not to be eavesdropping. 

“You know more about the Japanese games,” Joanna said, shoving the paper under his nose. “Have you seen this? I’m pretty sure  _ we _ don’t have it in stock, but…” 

Joanna was very happy to help customers find what they wanted, even when it meant pointing them to different stores, and that made her overall obnoxiousness slightly more palatable to Bakura. It also helped that she’d started bringing him coffee to his morning shifts after he’d kicked out a pair of teenaged boys that were harassing her. 

(Bakura wanted it on record that he’d simply seen a socially sanctioned way to be mean to someone,  _ not _ that he was intentionally helping Joanna.)

The Japanese text on the man’s print out was blurred but still perfectly readable. Bakura skimmed it and said, “It’s only being released at Otogi’s flagship store this week, with a national release next month.” He slid the paper across the counter, back toward the customer. The man nodded to indicate this made sense to him. “Otogi is backed by Industrial Illusions, so I’d guess a Western release won’t be far behind.”

The man looked disappointed, but Joanna promised they’d look into ordering the set as soon as possible and persuaded the man to give her his number so she could call with updates. 

“Can you read Japanese, then?” Joanna asked when the man left.

“I’m a man of many talents,” Bakura answered vaguely. 

“That’s amazing,” Joanna continued to babble. “I took French in school, but the only thing I remember is  _ ‘Je voudrais un jus de pamplemousse.’ _ I don’t even like grapefruit!”

Bakura tuned her out. It occurred to him that, if he were feeling so inclined, he could pick up a phone and get this man the silly dice set that he wanted. But that would involve explaining to Otogi or Ryou or– Gods forbid–  _ Yugi _ why he wanted the set to begin with, and that wasn’t worth any joy he’d get out of showing off. 

He thought it over as he finished his shift and closed up shop– Joanna did  _ not _ shut up the entire time– and it still occupied his mind as he bussed back to Little Whinging. Fiddling with a Monster World character figurine he couldn’t help but pocket while taking inventory, Bakura brainstormed ways to do it without revealing who he was to Otogi… 

Gods, how pathetic had he gotten, if obtaining a foreign game piece for a random British man seemed like an appealing challenge to him?

Bakura decided to redirect the urge to problem solve to a more fun challenge: figuring out what was up with the soul piece in Harry’s head. 

Their working theory was that, as a baby, Harry had split his soul in two as a way to deal with trauma, the same way Malik had at age ten. This explained why the soul piece took the form of a wailing infant, but not how the split had been done in the first place. 

Souls didn’t just break in two on their own. Either someone magical had done this to Harry, or Harry was magical himself. Unfortunately, Harry couldn’t really answer any questions about it, as he’d been only one year old when it happened.

Sitting on the living room couch with his bare feet propped on the coffee table, Bakura examined the card he’d saved the weird soul-baby in. Its image– wrinkly and grey and noseless– scowled back at him, frozen mid-wail. Surely Harry hadn’t looked like  _ this _ when he was a baby. 

“Ishizu wrote to the Tombkeepers,” Malik said, flopping down on the couch next to him. He leaned over to look at the card as well. “I told them to get a phone ages ago, but nooo…”

Malik continued to complain and Bakura only half-listened. Something about Malik technically being the head of their entire extended family of Tombkeepers, but people not wanting to listen to him on account of the whole “broke three millennia of tradition to start a criminal empire and then murder the pharaoh he’d been born to protect” thing. 

“If I took the soul piece out,” Bakura said, interrupting Malik mid-sentence and holding up the card, “how hard do you think it would be to put it back in?”

“Only one way to find out,” Malik said, sitting up. 

As it turned out, the answer was  _ very _ hard without a Millennium Item. The Items made manipulating and amplifying the innate energy of the soul, which Ancient Egyptians called  _ Ba, _ a thousand times easier; without an Item, they had to fall back on using the ritual of a shadow game. This involved Bakura beating the soul-baby in a game of 20 Questions. 

(The baby lost, of course, because all its guesses were wordless screams.)

“Okay,” Malik said when they’d finally gotten it back in the card. The house filled with blissful silence. “I vote we never tell Ishizu we did that.”

xXx

The easiest way to investigate the mystery of Harry Potter, Bakura decided, was to spend time with Harry. This was the excuse he gave himself for inviting Harry over whenever he could to play games. 

(Bakura did not mind that Harry being allowed over relied entirely on him reporting to his aunt how much dirty laundry Bakura had accrued in the corner of his room. Bakura even started leaving things strewn around the entire house just to see Harry’s eyes widen in excitement when he noticed.)

(The giant screaming man– Harry’s uncle– also made a very weird comment in passing about the Dursleys saving money on food when Harry wasn’t around, which Bakura decided not to dwell on.) 

Bakura learned very quickly that Harry had no patience for any game that involved a lot of strategy. It wasn’t that Harry was stupid, per se; he just seemed to be allergic to stopping to  _ think.  _

After several rounds of Duel Monsters, all of which were boring because Harry refused to use any of the clever card combinations Bakura had basically handed to him on a platter, Bakura had to admit that maybe Malik was right. Maybe he  _ should _ have made Harry a deck for idiots who just wanted to summon strong monsters. Something like what Jounouchi Katsuya used, which was half luck and half easy last-minute strategies… 

...but then he’d have to admit he was wrong and then make a deck designed for an idiot, and Bakura refused to do either. 

Instead, Bakura stole a regular set of cards from the game shop and they switched to slapjack. Harry’s strengths were quick reflexes and pattern recognition, and so slapjack managed to be fun for an entire two days before Bakura got sick of it. 

“Let’s try something new,” Bakura told Harry when he showed up one afternoon late in August. 

“A board game?” Harry asked hopefully. He’s been pushing to play Monopoly, presumably because he’d never been allowed to play before and hadn’t yet learned it was the worst game on earth. 

“Something better,” Bakura said and then led him out of the house. 

One thing that Bakura liked about Harry was that he was willing to try out any activity Bakura threw at him. Malik would bitch and moan about any game that wasn’t Duel Monsters or one of the few games he’d grown up with, and Ishizu would do a politer version of the same bitching and moaning on the rare occasion she had free time to play games to begin with.  _ Harry _ was willing to try anything. 

Bakura brought Harry to his empty primary school, suggested they break in to play hide and seek, and Harry only looked somewhat skeptical. 

“Isn’t that,” Harry hedged, “you know, illegal?”

“Do you see anyone else here?” Bakura said, waving at the empty car park. “Are you not a student here? Is it not your right to use the school?”

“But…” Harry started and trailed off. 

“It’ll be fun,” Bakura promised. “And if we get caught– which we won’t– I’ll take all the blame.”

Harry’s brows furrowed, weighing the pros and cons. 

“And if you catch me,” Harry asked, “you’ll only tag me, right?”

Despite it being an odd question, Bakura didn’t think twice about it because Harry was filled with odd questions. 

“You mean  _ when _ I catch you,” Bakura corrected. “Then I’ll tag you, yes.”

Harry agreed then, and Bakura led them around to a sidedoor where he could jimmy the lock without someone from the street noticing. He walked up to it planning to pick or break it, and then thought better of it. 

Bakura had not practiced much  _ heka– _ what his people called the manipulation of  _ Ba, _ or magic– since he’d gotten his soul slapped into the Millennium Ring. There’d simply been no need, when the Ring could do whatever he liked with minimal effort. Still, Bakura had grown up in a village of thieves and survived into adulthood with  _ heka _ to help him with locks and traps. 

Perhaps he should practice. 

Ancient Egyptians had had tumbler locks even in Bakura’s first life, so it only took a little fiddling with  _ heka _ to get the lock open. From Harry’s point of view, it must have looked like Bakura had just glared at the door handle for a minute before it clicked open, because the boy’s mouth literally fell open. Bakura tried and failed to hold back a smirk. 

Bakura had chosen hide and seek for the completely juvenile reason that he liked breaking into and then sneaking around places, and it seemed like a child-friendly adventure to bring Harry along on. Harry himself seemed nervous entering the school, but when no teacher immediately jumped out to expel him, he relaxed. 

“You have to turn around while I hide,” Harry told Bakura. “That’s how everyone plays. I’ve seen it.”

Bakura rolled his eyes good naturedly and turned to the wall, then made a big deal of counting to twenty as lazily and loudly as he could. He listened to Harry’s footsteps as he ran off. 

The kid wasn’t nearly as loud as Bakura had expected a ten year old to be. Bakura also didn’t find him immediately, which was why he’d picked a building Harry was familiar with and Bakura was not. Winning in the first five minutes was never fun. 

Bakura eventually found Harry wedged behind a wire shelving unit in a supply closet. They played again, and Harry hid under the stage of the little auditorium, and then standing on top of a toilet in a stall, and then finally managed to fold himself up into the oversized drawer of a filing cabinet. 

“Impressive,” Bakura said mildly as Harry crawled out. 

“I want to try being It next,” Harry said, rubbing his arms. “That was  _ really _ uncomfortable.”

After forty-five minutes of Harry not finding Bakura in an air duct, Bakura moved to sitting under the headmaster’s desk, and then to standing out in the open of the office and flipping through student records. 

“I already checked in here!” Harry cried when he found him. “You’re cheating.”

“You must not have checked very well, then,” Bakura answered, eyebrows raised. 

The sound of a car outside in the carpark sent both of them running, Harry in a panic and Bakura holding back childish giggles. Bakura let Harry take the lead, and he led him out the back into a playground.

“Okay,” Harry said, panting. “We’re allowed to be here.”

“Come on,” Bakura said, “I’ll buy you an ice cream or something.”

When Bakura finally went home to Number 6, Ishizu greeted him with a knowing smile. 

“Shut up,” Bakura told her. 

“It’s adorable,” Ishizu said. “I’m so proud. When are you going to get all this junk off the table?”

She gestured at his Monster World board, which was now nearly complete. All Bakura had to do was put together a group and iron out the details of the story he wanted to play. 

When he asked Malik, the blond just made a face. 

“Don’t you have other friends now?” Malik asked, his nose all scrunched up. “From your game shop? Who  _ like _ this shit?”

Joanna would probably play Monster World with Bakura. Bakura did not want to play with Joanna. 

He knew Harry would play if invited. Monster World might be more Harry’s speed than Duel Monsters, anyway– Harry was creative enough and good at making up things on the fly, and a teammate with a better head for long-term planning would mitigate Harry’s imperative to make rash and stupid decisions. 

But still, Harry was only one player. Bakura needed more. 

xXx

The first week of September, they Tombkeepers wrote back that they’d found relevant writings on soul-splitting magic but judged them too dangerous to post all the way to England, and Harry started school. The boy informed Bakura he could only come over on weekends now, since he’d need his afternoons after class for chores and homework. 

“Are you  _ sulking?” _ Malik teased the first Wednesday without Harry. Bakura had the day off, and was spending it listlessly staring at his completed  _ Monster World _ board that no one would play with him. 

“Shut up,” Bakura growled and threw his player’s manual at Malik. 

They were at a dead-end with the mystery of the soul piece, and now Bakura didn’t even have a regular, proper playmate. It pissed him off. 

There was one potential bright side of the situation that Bakura could. Now that Harry was back in school and could play with friends his own age, then maybe Bakura could have access to _ lots _ of Harrys. 

Playing Monster World with three or four ten year olds wasn’t Bakura’s ideal player group, but it was certainly better than not playing at all. He’d played with young kids before– disguised as Ryou, of course– and  _ that _ had been fine, even if the best parts were them begging for mercy. Besides, he liked Harry alright, and there was a good chance Harry’s friends would approach his level of alrightness. Birds of a feather and all that.

He’d have to keep gameplay to Saturdays and sabotage anyone trying to join a football club or some nonsense, but it was certainly doable. 

“Um,” Harry said when Bakura brought the idea up to him. “I do want to play Monster World, but can’t we just ask Malik?”

“Why?” Bakura snapped. He’d had to ambush Harry on his walk home from school, and Harry was very obviously trying to creep around him to continue on his way. Bakura widened his stance to block the whole pavement. “What’s wrong with your friends?”

“Well,” Harry said, his cheeks turning red. “I don’t really have any.”

Bakura stared at him. “What do you mean, you don’t have any?”

Harry was definitely one of the more likeable kids out there. There was no way he didn’t have friends. The pharaoh had friends, and he was a dick. Even Bakura had tricked people into liking him!

Harry fidgeted. Bakura sighed dramatically. 

“It’s not hard to make friends, you know,” Bakura said testily. Ryou had never had problems, and he was both shy and a weird kid. “Just go up to the kids that like Duel Monsters and ask them about their favorite monsters. Then tell them about Monster World.”

That seemed reasonable, right? Kids made friends that way, right?

“I guess I can try,” Harry mumbled, then stepped into the overgrown lawn of Number 6 to walk around Bakura. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, though…”

Several days later, Harry showed up on the doorstep of Number 6 with his glasses broken neatly in two across the bridge. He held them up to his face with both hands while he talked to Bakura. A dark spot was forming at the inside of his right eye, likely the result of the same dumb accident that had broken his glasses. It was the most pathetic thing Bakura had ever seen. 

“Er– sorry,” Harry stuttered out. “I just came to tell you, um, that I  _ really _ don’t think I can find more people for your game. Sorry.”

“What do you mean?” Bakura demanded. Surely making friends couldn’t be this difficult. Ryou could always do it, and he was a timid nerd with a reputation for friends in comas. 

“Do you have any tape?” Harry asked. 

Bakura led Harry into the kitchen and rummaged through the drawers until he found a roll of tape. Handing it over to Harry, he demanded again, “Explain.”

“Well,” Harry started, carefully setting his glasses on the table while he picked up the tape, “I tried talking to some of my classmates. The ones who like games, just like you said.” Harry broke off a long piece of tape and then dropped into a chair, squinting carefully at his glasses as he began to meticulously tape them back together. “And it was okay! But then, um, Dudley happened.”

Harry shot Bakura a strong look that somehow simultaneously communicated “I’m sorry” and “I told you so.”

“You’re still not explaining it,” Bakura said, crossing his arms and tapping his foot impatiently at Harry’s rambling explanation. “Why do any of your classmates care what Dudley thinks? Surely none of them actually  _ like _ him.”

Bakura had only had the one interaction with Harry’s cousin, but based on observation and the off-hand remarks Harry made, he sounded like a spoiled, obnoxious brat.

“Well of course no one  _ likes _ him,” Harry said, carefully setting his glasses back on his face. “But no one wants to be a victim of Harry Hunting either.”

Harry shot Bakura a frustrated glare, which just accentuated his growing black eye. Bakura glared right back at him and then turned toward the freezer to exact a bag of frozen corn. 

“What the hell is Harry Hunting?” Bakura asked, tossing the frozen corn at Harry. The kid caught it easily. 

“It’s Dudley’s favorite game,” Harry said, and then did not apply the frozen vegetables to his face like Bakura meant him to. Instead, he continued to wrinkle his forehead at Bakura in a mixture of irritation and frustration. “It’s like hide and seek, but if you lose, Dudley beats the snot out of you.

“Here,” Harry continued, tossing the frozen corn onto the table and lifting his shirt. “Look.”

There was indeed a huge bruise forming at the base of Harry’s ribcage. 

Several things fit together into Bakura’s mind all at once. Why Harry had wanted to know what Bakura would do if he won at hide and seek. Why he’d gotten so weird about just talking to other children. Why Harry had decided  _ Bakura _ of all people was a good choice in playmates. 

Bakura had not felt rage this strong in quite a while. It felt like a hit to the chest, making his vision tint red and threatening to knock him off his feet. He gripped the back of a chair for support. 

“Er,” said Harry, blinking up at him in concern. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Bakura heard himself snarl. “Put ice on that, you moron.”

Harry dutifully held the frozen corn to his face and a frozen half-loaf of bread Bakura also dug out of the freezer to his side for several minutes. Then he insisted he had to get to his chores, and that it really wasn’t that bad, really, and basically Harry’s own fault for not being fast enough. 

Bakura let him go, and then slumped down into the chair he’d been increasingly tightening his grip on. 

Bakura had of course known Harry’s family had treated him like garbage. Families were like that sometimes, and Bakura really hadn’t considered it his business up until this moment. Bakura himself had done much worse things to children than just beat up someone his own age. He really,  _ really _ shouldn’t care. 

Still. If Harry wasn’t even allowed to make friends… 

Well, how dare Harry’s horrible little brat of a cousin try and interfere with Bakura’s plans?

Ishizu was at work and Malik had gone off to do whatever Malik did when he went out, which left Bakura with no outlet but to stew in his own anger. He paced the living room for twenty minutes, mind oscillating between horrifically evil plans and the promise that he’d at least try to behave like a regular member of society. 

At some point, Bakura realized he could see Dudley’s bedroom window from their back living room window. He watched the kid at his computer for a few moments and realized there was really only one morally correct way forward. 

It wasn’t hard to break into Number 4 just after midnight, and using  _ heka _ to silence Dudley’s room so they could have a conversation was just as easy as it had been three thousand years ago. 

“A game?” Dudley asked, brows furrowed. 

“It’ll be fun,” Bakura promised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dun dun duuuuun!
> 
> A ramble on magic (this will get explored in-text in later chapters, so ignore the following if you don’t care that much lol): Basically I’m imagining heka as the “quick and dirty” magic common people practiced before wands and standardized spells were readily available. I don’t think there’s a lot of canon evidence this existed as a concept in YGO, but given in this AU the events of HP also happened, there must have been some “everyday” ancient magic going on among the common magical folk. Shadow games and advanced rituals (which are technically heka because heka is just the ancient Egyptian word for magic lol) were what educated priests/witches/wizards used and are more powerful but less accessible than common heka. 
> 
> So, as an example of the difference between ancient and modern magic, Bakura uses a spell that’s like a “primitive” version of an unlocking charm, so he has to adjust the spell a few times to make it work on a modern lock (Egyptians did have pin and tumbler locks, but they were made of wood!). Casting a modern _alohomora_ via a wand removes the guesswork and necessity of adjustment to different types of locks, BUT it’s easier to charm something against a known unlocking spell than one the user can change around to fit their needs. So basically, Bakura’s version takes more time and effort, but it’s more versatile if you’re trying to do something naughty. ;)


	7. a friend in need

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which, quite predictably, the Dursleys don't react well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This may be redundant, but **warning** for Vernon being extra terrible in his abuse this chapter.

Harry woke up one morning to a lot of screaming. It was only Petunia at first, her shrill voice piercing through Harry’s sleepy mind, followed quickly by a lot of shouting from Vernon. 

Petunia’s footsteps on the stairs were even louder than normal as she bolted for the telephone in the kitchen. Harry rolled onto his back as he listened to Petunia beg someone to come save her poor Dudders. 

A few minutes later, there were sirens. Harry decided it was best for his own wellbeing to not poke his head out of his cupboard to see what was going on, but he did listen very closely. 

Men came into the house and talked to Petunia about what had happened. In a tone through which Harry could practically hear handwringing, Petunia said that she’d gone to wake Dudley for school as normal, but he’d been unresponsive. The man assured her Dudley still had a steady pulse and was breathing normally, and then there was an awful lot of creaking on the stairs and then the sound of the door and then more sirens. 

Harry laid in bed for a while longer, enjoying the silence of the house. 

If his cousin had been rushed off to hospital, would Harry be expected to go to school? He doubted it. Still, if Petunia or Vernon came home and found him still dozing in bed, he’d be punished. 

Harry got out of bed and showered and got dressed as usual. He spent a few extra minutes making himself bacon and eggs and toast, then grabbed his school things and went out. 

Ishizu was standing outside of Number 6, leaning against her car in the driveway expectantly. 

“Good morning, Harry,” she greeted. “Lots of excitement at your place this morning, I see.”

“Er, yes ma’am,” Harry replied. “My cousin was feeling a bit under the weather, but I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

Harry actually had no idea if Dudley’s condition was serious or not. The bruise on Harry’s side still smarted, though, so he couldn’t quite bring himself to care. 

“Hmm,” said Ishizu, and then opened the driver’s side door of her car. “Well, take care of yourself, Harry.”

Harry went to school– jogging the last bit of the way when he remembered that if he was late, they’d call his guardians– and had a rather boring rest of the morning. At lunch he realized that without Dudley, he could try and make a friend without the risk of being punched again. 

Harry was debating the best way to ask a girl with a Dark Magician Girl lunch box what monsters were in her deck, when a teacher appeared and said his uncle was here to pick him up. 

Uncle Vernon had  _ never _ shown up to pick up Harry. He’d come in his car to drive Dudley home at least once a week, but he always made Harry walk. Harry gathered his things and went to the front of the school with a sense of doom forming in the pit of his stomach. 

Vernon had a fixed smile on his face that was just a tad manic, but the school secretary seemed unbothered as she passed an early sign-out sheet across the desk for Vernon to sign. The smile did not waiver at all as Vernon led Harry back to the car. 

Harry, of course, felt very on edge. The best version of Vernon was one that was neither too happy nor too angry. 

It was only a five minute drive back to Privet Drive, during which neither Vernon nor Harry said a word. Harry picked at a loose thread on his shirt, and then stared longingly at Number 6 as they passed. There was no sign of movement inside the house at all; he wondered if Bakura was at work or sleeping in. 

When he’d parked in the drive, Vernon finally turned around in his seat and fixed Harry with his uncanny smile. 

“Thought you were being clever, eh?” Vernon asked. “Going to school like nothing was the matter?”

Harry didn’t say anything. Vernon in a mood was dangerous, and Harry needed to think fast to figure out what nonsense he needed to apologize for in order to avoid an eruption. 

When Harry continued to be silent, the smile dropped off Vernon’s face, replaced by a dark rage. 

“I know you did something, boy!” Vernon shouted, voice extra loud in the car. “I should have put my foot down years ago! You won’t be seeing sunlight until all the freakishness is squashed out of you!”

Vernon, for all his threats, had never actually put his hands on Harry. He’d laughed at cuts and bruises Harry got from Dudley, and watched approvingly as Petunia spanked Harry a few times when he was little, but Vernon himself had never physically punished Harry. That’s why it was a surprise when he reached into the back of the car, buried his meaty hand into Harry’s hair, and then dragged him into Number 4. 

Vernon shoved Harry roughly into the cupboard and locked it. 

“You’ll get food when Dudley wakes up,” Vernon bellowed.

Harry flopped back on his mattress, dread washing through him. Vernon couldn’t be serious, could he? They’d made Harry skip meals before, but never more than one in one go…

A few minutes later Harry heard the front door and then the sound of Vernon’s car starting. Figuring Vernon was going back to hospital to visit Dudley, Harry tried pushing at the cupboard door to see if he could make a break for it. The door was very decidedly locked. 

Harry remembered Bakura breaking a lock in his hands like it was magic, and wished he’d asked to learn too.

Later in the evening, heavy footsteps that could only be Vernon returned to the house. After some general banging, the sound of a power drill echoed through the cupboard. It sounded like Vernon was using it right on the door itself. 

“Sir,” Harry tried, yelling over the sound of the drill, “I’m awfully sorry. It was an accident. I’ll never do it again.”

Vernon ignored him, whistling while he worked. 

After that, Vernon watched television for an hour and went upstairs. There was no sign of Petunia, who must have been staying overnight with Dudley. For the first time in Harry’s life, he had the odd sensation of missing his aunt. She was awful too, of course, but she was slightly more reasonable and would have thought to let Harry out to use the bathroom. 

In the morning, Vernon left, and Harry had to dig out The Jar from under his clothes. The Jar was a jam jar Harry had hidden away for the event that one night while under cupboard lockdown, Petunia forgot to let him out for the toilet. 

Harry had never had to use The Jar before, but no amount of pounding on the cupboard door would make it budge. 

Harry spent the rest of the day lying on his mattress, wishing he’d thought to grab his schoolbag before Vernon wrestled him out of the car. He was pretty sure he had half a ham sandwich in there. 

Vernon came home again at night and did not make any sort of audible reaction to Harry banging on the cupboard door and begging to be let out. Harry even tried yelling that he could only fix Dudley if Vernon let him out, but to no avail. 

Something finally happened mid-afternoon the next day. Harry did not hear the front door or footsteps, but there was a sudden knocking on his cupboard door. 

“Harry?” Bakura’s voice asked. He sounded very confused. 

Harry sat up so fast it made him dizzy. “Bakura!”

“What the hell is this?” Bakura asked, voice muffled through the door. 

“Can you let me out?” Harry asked. 

There was a long pause, and then Bakura said, “Hold on.”

A couple seconds later, there was a horrible wrenching noise from the door, and Harry scooted as far away from it as he could. The bare light bulb in the cupboard made it hot and stuffy if left on for too long, and so Harry had been mostly sitting in the dark. The sudden light from the outside made him squint, but he swore he saw a white, winged monster tossing aside the scraps of his cupboard door. The monster evaporated as soon as Harry’s eyes started to focus properly. 

“Why the hell were you in there?” Bakura asked as Harry crawled out of the cupboard. 

“Um,” said Harry. “I live in there.”

Bakura’s eyes traveled slowly from Harry to the mattress on the floor of the cupboard and then back again. 

“They boarded it up,” Bakura said flatly. Harry couldn’t tell if he was angry or not.

“Well,” Harry said, adjusting his glasses. “That’s… new?”

Bakura pinched the bridge of his nose and said a very rude word. 

Since Bakura wasn’t likely to lock Harry away indefinitely for being rude, Harry left him to stumble into the kitchen. Harry was busily stuffing his face with Dudley’s crisps when Bakura appeared behind him and said, “Eat something with water in it– fruit, or something. Dehydration will get you before hunger.”

He sounded very resigned about it. Bakura sat at the table and watched, slightly impatiently, as Harry ate as much as he could. Then Bakura marched him over to Number 6. 

“I told you something fishy was going on,” Bakura told Malik. Harry sank into an armchair, his body feeling heavy and woozy from eating too much at once. His stomach hurt. 

“And I told you he was still alive,” Malik, who was laying across the entirety of the couch, shot back. 

“Barely,” Bakura snarled back, and then gave Malik a run down of how Harry had been locked in a cupboard with four boards nailed across it. “I had to use my  _ Ka _ to break it open.”

“Oh shit,” said Malik, sitting up. “Why did they do that?”

“Because they’re insane,” Bakura provided at the same time Harry said, “They think I did something to Dudley.”

“What do you mean?” Malik asked him. 

“He didn’t wake up one morning,” Harry said. “He’s been in hospital for days.”

For some reason, this caused Malik to give Bakura a very accusing look. 

“What?” Bakura demanded. “Maybe he has a medical condition.”

“Uh huh,” said Malik, rolling his eyes. “Did you do what Ishizu is always telling me to do? Ask yourself, ‘What would Pharaoh Atem do?’”

“This is  _ exactly _ what the pharaoh would do,” Bakura countered. 

“So you  _ did _ do something!”

Bakura stepped back and performed a very impressive high-kick that got Malik right in the shoulder. 

Bakura and Malik proceeded to have some sort of argument or discussion in the kitchen, leaving Harry to vegetate in his armchair and watch television. The local news was very mundane and boring, which seemed odd to Harry, given how his life had just been flipped upside down. 

Eventually, Ishizu came home, and there was a lot of yelling from both Bakura and Malik, and some very stern words from Ishizu. The gist of the argument was that the Ishtar siblings blamed Bakura for what happened to Dudley, and that that made Harry getting boarded up in his cupboard Bakura’s fault. Bakura’s defense was that Dudley had hit Harry. 

“He’s a  _ child,” _ Ishizu emphasized, although she sounded resigned. “You have to let him out.”

“Fine,” Bakura said, voice filled with venom. “But we’re not letting Harry go back there.”

“Aw, the thief cares,” Malik teased, and then there was a lot of crashing and Ishizu telling the two of them off. 

Eventually, Ishizu appeared in the living room, looking tired. “Harry, you’ll stay the night with us,” she told him. 

Number 6’s version of Dudley’s second room was what they called “Rishid’s room,” and they had not bothered furnishing it all the way because this Rishid person was off traveling. Still, it had a comfortable bed with white sheets and a dark grey duvet folded at its foot. 

Harry didn’t think the Ishtars were very used to having guests, as he had to remind Ishizu he needed a towel, and she seemed confused about which bathroom to tell him to use. 

“Can I go get my toothbrush and pyjamas?” Harry asked. Through the window at the end of the hallway, he could see that Vernon’s car was still missing from Number 4. 

“Why don’t you tell me where they are,” Ishizu said, “and Malik and I will fetch them for you?”

They left him with Bakura. The Ishtars had recently been trying to delegate cooking dinner as a chore, and tonight was Bakura’s turn. He swore under his breath as he moved around the kitchen. Harry helped by snapping the ends off of a big bowl of string beans. 

“My aunt makes a really good sauce for these,” Harry said. “I think I remember the recipe if you have the ingredients.”

Bakura made a face. “Why would I want to eat something your aunt makes?”

Harry’s feelings were hurt just a little, and he wasn’t even sure why, because Bakura was always mean to everyone. 

“Because it tastes good,” Harry said, and Bakura just shrugged and ignored him. 

Midway through rubbing minced garlic onto strips of meat, Bakura paused to stare out the window to the street. 

“Shit,” he said, and then walked out of the kitchen without even washing his hands. 

Harry wanted to follow Bakura, but also didn’t want to just leave raw meat sitting out on the counter indefinitely. He quickly finished seasoning it and popped them in the oven before running after Bakura. 

Bakura had gone outside, leaving the front door wide open, and Harry froze on the front stoop when he realized what the problem was. Vernon’s car was back. 

Harry stood on the stoop, debating his options. Vernon was a very unpleasant man, and Harry didn’t want to just abandon his friends to the unpleasantness. On the other hand, Harry showing up would likely just make Vernon more unpleasant. 

In the end, Harry decided to go back inside and finish dinner. If Bakura could pull a weird baby from Harry’s head and make Dudley magically sick, he could probably handle Uncle Vernon. 

Some time later, all three residents of Number 6 came back. Bakura was smirking smugly, like he’d won some sort of argument, and Malik was carrying the suitcase Harry kept all his things in. Ishizu looked deeply embarrassed and had Harry’s toothbrush clutched in her hand. 

“Oh,” Ishizu said, looking at the spread of food Harry had put together. He’d had to arrange it all on the kitchen counter, as Bakura’s game board took up most of the table. “This is nice… Here’s your toothbrush.”

She handed it over and then sat down, looking lightheaded. Malik dumped Harry’s suitcase in the front hallway and had to turn to face the wall to hide his snickering. 

“I’ve never done anything like that,” Ishizu half-moaned, burying her face in her hands. 

“I thought it was a bit cool,” Malik said, as if he was telling the best joke in the world. 

“What happened?” Harry asked. 

“Ishizu had a… conversation with your aunt and uncle,” Bakura said, and Malik’s shoulders seized up again with repressed laughter. “You won’t be seeing them for a while.”

“Or possibly ever!” Malik chimed in, and Ishizu shot him the meanest glare Harry had ever seen. 

They ate in the living room, and the adults mostly ignored Harry while they talked about something to do with police reports. 

“It’ll be fine,” Bakura said for the third time. “There’s no evidence of a crime committed, so they’ll just putter around for a while and then give it up as a medical mystery.”

Bakura had, apparently, “done this” lots of times before. Harry wasn’t quite sure what “this” was, but he suspected it had to do with Dudley being in hospital. 

When they were done eating, Ishizu made Harry swear to tell everyone that he’d spent the last two nights at Number 6 at the request of his aunt and uncle. He was to tell anyone who asked that he’d been staying with the Ishtars while Dudley was in hospital, since his aunt and uncle were spending too much time at Dudley’s side to care for him. 

After dinner, Malik kept teasing Ishizu until she caved to a game of Duel Monsters with him. They let Harry keep score, while Bakura lazed in the background and scribbled notes for his Monster World game in a notebook. 

After Harry showered and brushed his teeth and changed into his pyjamas, Ishizu stuck her head into his room to make sure he was alright. 

“Things are going to change soon,” she said. “I’m afraid your destiny isn’t one that’s meant to be easy.”

Sometimes, Ishizu said really weird things. 

“Please don’t blame Bakura for what happened to you,” she continued. “He really did want to help. He’s just not used to thinking about consequences for other people.”

It hadn’t even crossed Harry’s mind to blame Bakura for being locked away for three days, the same way he never blamed teachers when they commented to the Dursleys they should get Harry clothes that fit, and Harry was punished for it. Yes, Vernon had done something awful to Harry because he was angry about something Bakura had done, but that was  _ Vernon’s _ fault. He told Ishizu as much, and she smiled softly and wished him a good night. 

Harry snuggled down further into the bed. He’d only ever slept in a real bed when the Dursleys went on holiday and left him with Ms. Figg. Sleeping outside of the snugness of his cupboard always made Harry agoraphobic, and he pulled the duvet over his head. 

Maybe he  _ was _ a little cross with Bakura, Harry thought. Not just for setting Vernon’s rage into motion, but for not saving Harry sooner, and for generally being mean and snippy. Or maybe Harry was a little afraid of him? Bakura was nice enough to Harry, but he could do awful things with his strange magic, and was perfectly willing to do so. 

It was all very confusing and Harry’s stomach still ached a bit, so Harry decided to ponder these things later. He fell asleep. 

xXx

Ishizu drove Harry to school in the morning, and his day proceeded as usual. Aside from his main teacher pulling him aside to tell him the whole school was there to support him during his trying time, no one mentioned Dudley. 

Things got more interesting when Harry walked back to Privet Drive. Three police cars were outside of Number 4, and a neighbor from down the street was very dedicatedly walking his dog up and down the block and staring at the house. He waved Harry down when he saw him.

“Here he is!” the neighbor yelled, and a police officer came over to talk to Harry. Bakura trailed behind him. 

“You’re Harry Potter?” the officer asked. 

“Yes, sir,” Harry answered. 

The officer sighed and put a consolatory hand on Harry’s shoulder. The first thing he said was, “Your aunt and uncle are still alive,” which was the shortest way to tell Harry something unspeakably horrible had happened to them. 

Basically, Bakura had called for an ambulance that morning and told them he’d gone over to Number 4 when they weren’t answering their telephone. He said he’d wanted updates on for how much longer he was to babysit Harry, and found Petunia and Vernon unconscious in the living room. 

“Do you have any family in the area that can take care of you?” the police officer asked. 

“No, sir,” Harry answered truthfully. 

“We don’t mind at all,” Bakura said, and his voice was all respectful and soft in a way Harry had never heard from him before. “We already knew we might have him for weeks.”

“Hmm,” said the officer.

Harry ended up sitting in the Ishtars’ living room and talking to a very nice lady officer almost all evening. She made a bunch of calls (including one to Aunt Marge, who screamed at her for ten minutes straight) and concluded there really wasn’t anyone to take care of Harry, and that the neighbors vouched for Bakura regularly babysitting Harry. 

When all the excitement died down and the police left, Malik leaned into Ishizu with a huge smirk on his face and whispered, “Look what you’ve done.”

Ishizu threw up her hands and half-yelled, “They were keeping him in a  _ cupboard!” _

The next couple of days, in Harry’s personal opinion, were fantastic. The Ishtars had whispered conversations about what would happen if they let “the child” out but not Petunia and Vernon, or if it was really better to let them be “a family together.” Harry went to school with extra snacks in his lunch sack, played games after he did his homework in the evenings, and didn’t scrub a single toilet. 

Then, on Sunday, a wizard showed up. 

Harry was in the backyard of Number 6, kicking around a beat-up football he’d found in the park, when the man appeared as if out of thin air. He was very old with a very long white beard, and was wearing a bright purple… well, to Harry it sort of looked like a very fancy bathrobe. 

“Hello, Harry,” the man greeted. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”

“Er,” said Harry. 

“My condolences about your family,” the man continued. “May I speak to your current caretaker?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> C-c-c-CLIFFHANGER!!! (SIRENS)
> 
> I don't know how it's decided where children go short-term right after their caretakers have gone into mysterious comas, but you know what! This is fiction! They go to their nice neighbors!!


	8. eye to millennium eye (part 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bakura meets an actual heckin' wizard and makes a Plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter and the next will both be Bakura POV, since there was too much to cover in one chapter without it being ridiculously long.
> 
> I hope the end of this chapter makes up for how mad you guys are going to be at the beginning. xD
> 
> A glossary of terms, because I know at least a few readers aren't super familiar with YGO:  
> Ba (canon YGO term) - "Spiritual energy"; in this fic interpreted as the force/energy behind magic  
> Ka (canon YGO term) - "Monster spirit"; the physical summoning of Ba, which takes the form of a fun monster friend, like a Digimon but made of your soul. Your Ka's traits depend on the nature and strength of your Ba. Bakura's Ka is a super buff demon dude.  
> Heka (not YGO canon) - the Ancient Egyptian word for "magic"; a general term for any application of Ba

Bakura sat at the kitchen table, scowling at the strange man claiming to be a wizard. 

“Oh, this is lovely,” the man said, peering intently down at Bakura’s Monster World board. Bakura had to stop himself from gloating– he wasn’t quite as good a craftsman as Ryou, but he thought he’d done an excellent job. “Is it a decoration? A game?”

Behind them, Ishizu was making tea. Malik had taken Harry to the park with his dumb football, at the weird man’s request for privacy. 

“Go back to the part about being a wizard,” Bakura said, and Ishizu set a cup down in front of their guest and settled into a chair with her own mug.

Introductions had been a bit odd, as the man– Dumbledore– had assumed they were foreign wizards and started spouting nonsense immediately. It turned out the UK had an entire secret society of magical people, which Bakura and Ishizu were entitled to accessing due to their own magical abilities. Dumbledore had not requested proof of magic, but had demonstrated his own wizardly abilities by pulling out an actual magical wand and transforming one of their kitchen chairs into a frilly pink armchair, which he now sat in. 

Dumbledore was very certain that Egypt also had its own secret wizard society, and Ishizu had to whip out her “ancient bloodline of Tombkeepers” card to explain who they were and why they had no idea the UK had magical laws. It helped that today she had dressed extra over-the-top, all in white and gold. 

Looking between Ishizu and Dumbledore, it was difficult to decide who looked less like they belonged in Little Whinging. 

“So then I suppose you don’t know who Harry Potter is,” Dumbledore said, frowning slightly. 

“Our neighbor,” Bakura supplied. 

“Hmm, yes,” Dumbledore agreed. Then he told Bakura the most insane story he’d ever heard, about an evil wizard and baby Harry and killing curses. Bakura still wasn’t sure what Dumbledore was to the wizarding world (what the hell was a mugwump?), but it sounded like he was something like Harry’s case worker. “So you see, Harry is in very real danger–”

“Hold on, back up,” Bakura interrupted. “Harry is a  _ wizard?” _

“Well, yes,” said Dumbledore, his eyes twinkling in amusement. “As were his parents. Unfortunately, there are people out there who would hurt Harry–”

“His  _ family _ hurt him,” Ishizu interrupted. Her face was calm and resolute. 

Dumbledore sighed and had the nerve to look incredibly sad. 

He started talking about blood wards, then, which made a lot more sense to Bakura’s concept of magic than transforming chairs. Blood magic wasn’t as good as soul magic, but it could still be powerful. If this Voldemort was half as persistent as Bakura had been when he’d been trying to take over the world, then Bakura would also want absurd wards spackled all over Harry’s house. 

They wouldn’t keep  _ Bakura _ out, obviously, but maybe they’d work on a common wizard. 

Dumbledore’s conclusion was that he was going to bring in wizard healers to fix whatever had happened to Dursleys, which he seemed to think was either an exotic hex or some sort of strange muggle genetic condition. He requested that Harry spend no more nights over at Number 6, lest he destroy his wards by claiming a new home. 

“They’re already starting to weaken,” Dumbledore said with the slightest touch of anxiety. Bakura was beginning to like the man less and less: how dare he talk to Bakura as if he were a child? “It’s why I came to investigate myself. It’s why it’s imperative that Harry–”

“Bullshit,” Bakura told him, raising his voice. “Your wards couldn’t stop his uncle from starving him to death. They couldn’t even stop someone from splitting Harry’s soul in two.”

Dumbledore stared at Bakura for several seconds, his tea cup halfway to his mouth. His brows lowered and he set the cup back down carefully. In his most serious voice yet, he asked, “What do you mean?”

In very prim and angry tones, Ishizu explained the state they’d found Harry in while Bakura got up and retrieved the baby’s soul card from where he’d stored it in the napkin holder that kept their take-out menus. He tossed it across the table at Dumbledore. 

“We took  _ that _ out of the kid’s head,” he said. 

Dumbledore stared at the card for a very long time. Whatever response he had for Harry’s family locking him away to die in a cupboard was completely derailed by the soul card. 

“How did you do this?” Dumbledore asked eventually. His hand was now clutching his wand tightly, and the knowing twinkle was gone from his eyes. 

“Our people have always used soul magic,” Ishizu said easily. “It’s one of our strongest traditions.”

Dumbledore moved his gaze to Ishizu and asked, “And why did you move your ancient traditions to Surrey?”

Coolly, Ishizu answered, “It hasn’t got anything to do with Harry, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Dumbledore and Ishizu kept eye-contact for over a full minute, after which Dumbledore’s lips twitched upwards. 

“Alright,” he said finally, much more cheerfully. “You’re a formidable Occlumens, Miss Ishtar.”

Ishizu’s lips pursed, and Bakura could see a tic in her eye. Whatever an Occlumens was, it had pissed Ishizu off. 

“What I want to know is,” Bakura said, loudly changing the topic of discussion, “if Harry killed this Voldemort person, why does he still need protection from him?”

Dumbledore hesitated a moment, then picked up the soul card very carefully, as if it might burn him. 

“I was going to tell you it was protection against Voldemort’s old followers, several of whom avoided legal sentencing,” Dumbledore said. “However, I think… you may be able to help me with the truth.”

The “truth,” as it were, was that Dumbledore very strongly believed that Voldemort was not dead. He believed that Voldemort had used a type of soul magic to split his soul apart, making what British wizards called  _ Horcruxes, _ and what Bakura would call a Tuesday night. It was so taboo in their society that Dumbledore warned them that just speaking about Horcruxes in public could get them in trouble with magical law enforcement. 

“So you see,” Dumbledore concluded, “until Voldemort is permanently destroyed, we simply cannot risk Harry being separated from his family.”

“His family” being synonymous with “magical protection,” which Dumbledore considered more important than a safe and healthy childhood. Bakura understood this line of thinking. However, in Bakura’s professional opinion, it was a stupid way to go about things, mostly because it got in Bakura’s way.

“Okay,” Bakura said when Dumbeldore finished, narrowing his eyes. “So just find these Horcruxes and get rid of them.”

“It’s not that simple,” Dumbledore sighed. “Although it gives me hope you managed to pull this one out of poor Harry. Really, I’m grateful.” 

“And yet you still want Harry to go back to living in a closet,” Ishizu said darkly. 

“In a year’s time he’ll be able to come live at Hogwarts, our school for magical children,” Dumbledore said. “Until then, it’s a regrettable but unavoidable situation.”

Dumbledore thanked them for the tea, said he may ask for assistance further down the road as he worked on the Horcrux problem, and then reminded them Harry must go back to his aunt and uncle before disappearing into thin air.

“...huh,” said Bakura. 

“He tried to read my mind,” Ishizu griped. “I could barely hide who you really are from him. With what he got, he must think Malik and I are fleeing family drama.”

_ “Huh,” _ said Bakura. 

“And did you notice he ran off with the soul card?” she asked. 

Bakura held up said soul card between his pointer and middle fingers, having lifted it off the man when he went to collect his empty teacup. “No, he didn’t.”

Dumbledore never reappeared to look for the wayward soul piece, so either he had decided Bakura’s hands were safe enough, or he was too embarrassed to admit he lost it. Bakura wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth, though, and didn’t put much thought into it. 

The frilly pink armchair stayed in their kitchen. It was quite comfortable. 

xXx

In the end, they let the Dursleys’ souls go. 

It wasn’t Bakura’s ideal solution, but as he felt his brain putting together a Plan, it was the best decision for the immediate problem. 

The immediate problem was this: Dumbledore didn’t seem to know _why_ the Dursleys had gone into comas. Bakura didn’t want to find out what would happen if the wizard healers figured out the Dursley’s ailment was a lack of souls and Dumbeldore put two and two together. It was always best to keep your best cards hidden until the last moment, after all, especially when dealing with unknown quantities like _the_ _wizard police._

(Bakura was not entirely convinced Dumbledore wasn’t making up crazy bullshit, but his story did make several things about Harry make more sense. Bakura confirmed the blood wards did actually exist and work, by hurling some  _ heka _ at Number 4 and observing the structure did not catch fire or cave to his Ka’s fists. Bakura was able to conclude that destructive magic coming from outside of the house was easily deterred, but shadow rituals and  _ Cask of Amontillado _ -inspired horrors on the inside of the house were not. For what they were, the blood wards were not a bad piece of magic, but they were simple enough to work around.)

Releasing the souls, while solving the Dumbledore issue, also created a new problem: it meant losing Harry. Bakura had not started this series of events with the end goal of keeping Harry, per se, but now that the risk of losing something was on the table, he wanted to  _ win.  _

The final deciding factor was that legally, they couldn’t keep Harry anyway. Bakura hadn’t been on the phone personally for any of the calls, but if his aunt and uncle didn’t wake up by some deadline, Harry was to be shuffled into foster care. Then Bakura would never get to play another game with him again. 

(This was especially infuriating to Bakura, because not being allowed to have something just made him more determined to get it. He  _ was _ going to help Harry form a group of friends to play Monster World with, and no wizards were going to stop him.)

And so, Bakura decided to lose a battle in order to win a war. 

“They’re,” Ishizu said of Petunia and Vernon’s souls, sounding very pained, “they’re in the toothbrushes.”

“You’re a terrible villain,” Malik told her, fighting back laughter. 

Ishizu had been the one to imprison their souls in… the Dursley’s toothbrushes… and so she had to be the one to let them out. Bakura snuck her into Number 4 at night, with the green army man harboring Dudley’s soul in his pocket. 

The Dursleys did not come home for another two days. When they did finally show their faces on Privet Drive, Bakura and Malik invited themselves over. 

Bakura hadn’t been allowed to make anyone cry and piss themselves in fear in a long time. It felt good, and all he’d had to do was threaten to take their souls back a few times. Some people just couldn’t stomach a few trips to the shadows. 

“Man,” Malik said as they walked back to Number 6, “I wish I still had the Millennium Rod. Imagine all that, but we did it by appearing in their literal nightmares.”

Harry looked hurt when they told him he had to go back, and it would have pulled on Bakura’s heartstrings if he’d had any heartstrings to pull. 

“We talked to them,” Bakura said mildly, by which he meant they’d terrorized and threatened them. “You’ll be moving to a real bedroom, and if you disappear for more than a day, we’ll come looking.”

“So,” Harry said, frowning, “if they start being really awful again…?”

Bakura leaned into him, grinning fiercely. “I’ll come pay them a visit.”

That seemed to cheer Harry up. 

xXx

Things slipped back into routine frighteningly easily after that, although Harry came over some evenings now and generally acted a lot more cheerful. He didn’t seem particularly traumatized by what had happened; Bakura didn’t think Harry fully grasped that he’d been left to die in a very painful way, and Bakura wasn’t going to explain it to him. Harry reported that while they weren’t quite friends yet, some other boys had started letting him play football with them during their break at school. 

“I told you to find friends who like  _ games,” _ Bakura said. 

Harry shrugged. “Football is a game,” he defended. 

Bakura strongly disagreed. 

Routine made Bakura restless, and so he spent a lot of time and effort to obtain the new Dungeon Dice Monsters set for their desperate customer. 

“Tell him it’ll be in in the next two weeks,” Bakura told Joanna.

Joanna, for her part, looked gobsmacked. “But how did you–”

“I have my ways,” Bakura said vaguely. 

(In truth, he’d called the flagship store and told enough lies to get Otogi’s personal office extension number. Then he’d walked into a Japanese restaurant and offered to pay a waitress to pretend to be a cute-but-vapid young woman wanting a birthday present for her brother in England. Based on Bakura's analysis of Otogi’s personality, this seemed like the right combination of things to make him feel generous enough to post some dice to the UK.

With Bakura’s “scary” facial scars and the weirdness of the request, the waitress probably would have just kicked him out of the restaurant, except that she was completely floored a random foreign man could speak fluent Japanese. She agreed after only a little haggling.)

His life was getting very boring, honestly, and Bakura was keeping a tiny chunk of an evil wizard’s soul in his kitchen. 

“Should we get rid of this?” Malik asked one evening while he was debating where to order from for dinner. He held up the card of the screaming baby. 

“It can’t do anything in there,” Bakura said, crossing his arms. “What if I want to start a collection?”

“Didn’t the wizard guy say they were hard to find?” Malik said. He was bummed he had not been able to have a conversation with an actual wizard. 

(They were all ignoring the fact that apparently little  _ Harry _ was an actual wizard too.)

“Maybe for him,” Bakura said. 

Malik snorted. “But not for  _ you? _ You don’t have your Ring anymore, thief.”

He didn’t, but he had other ways to find treasure. The next time Harry came over, Bakura decided to have a go at card scrying, filling Harry in on the details of why they should be engaging in this quest. 

“The baby in my head was a what?” Harry asked. Today he was wearing a shirt that actually fit him for a change. 

“A piece of the evil wizard that killed your parents, pay attention,” Bakura said, shuffling his cards. 

“And you think  _ I’m _ a wizard?” Harry repeated for the third time, sounding doubtful. 

“Yes, so you might as well learn some magic,” Bakura said, and dealt the cards in his preferred arrangement: three cards for the past, four for the present, and three for the future. 

The scrying didn’t work very well, giving confusing and largely meaningless results, and nothing that was helpful in pinpointing where pieces of an evil wizard’s soul might be hidden. At some point Ishizu came into watch and commented, “You need to deal fewer cards for the future. Divination always works best with the simplest tools.”

Bakura glared at her. Ishizu sighed and said she missed having a clear view of the future, which caused Harry to scrunch up his face in confusion. 

“I want to learn the thing you did with the lock,” Harry said, obviously bored by Bakura’s unsuccessful card reading. “You know, when we broke into my school.”

They practiced on the lock to Rishid’s room, but Harry had to go home before he made any progress.  _ Heka _ without a magical object to channel and focus _Ba_ was honestly challenging, and Bakura wondered if all British wizards used wands like Dumbledore’s. Maybe they’d give Harry a familiar or a crystal ball or a magician’s staff at magic school? Those were all European-y magic things, right?

“You’ve been very cute lately,” Malik observed, a green face mask painted over his skin. “With your little friend.”

“Fuck off,” Bakura snapped back. 

xXx

If Bakura had complete emotional control, he would back away from the whole Harry Potter situation and go find a different friend. But Bakura liked solving impossible challenges, and he liked hanging out with Harry, and– this was very important– multiple authority figures had told him he couldn’t keep Harry.

So obviously Bakura had to make it happen, and the first step to winning this war was solving the evil undead wizard problem. 

“That’s insane,” Ishizu said when he pitched his Plan. 

“It would benefit society at large,” Bakura drawled. “What would the Pharaoh do, Ishizu?”

“I’m not letting you break into a tomb and re-steal the Millennium Items,” Ishizu said flatly. “Malik, tell him we can’t do that.”

“Hmm,” Malik said, tapping his chin. “But with the Pharaoh’s soul gone, it’s not like he can open the Door to Darkness with them.”

“What, so it’s fine if we just let him have seven powerful magical tools to cause chaos with, as long as he can’t end the world with them?” Ishizu asked. “He’s already stolen souls  _ without _ an Item to help.”

_ “You _ took two of them,” Malik pointed out, eyes bright with glee, and Ishizu looked comically flummoxed.

“Don’t you miss your Necklace?” Bakura practically purred, and Ishizu buried her face in her hands. 

At the end of the day, Bakura’s point that he could very easily solve the societal issue of evil wizard Horcruxes with help of the Millennium Ring was a good one. Ishizu caved, and Malik got to write a very official missive to the Tombkeepers as their technical family head. 

(They’d find out if the Tombkeepers would respect Malik’s authority once they got to Atem’s tomb. Bakura couldn’t decide if it would be more fun or not if they tried to intervene.)

Bakura’s boss, Paul, had received a very nice thank you card from the Dungeon Dice Monsters man, and so Bakura was allowed two weeks leave at the end of the month with minimal complaining. Ishizu spent the next few weeks getting very fussy about making clearly delineated rules about what they could and couldn’t use shadow rituals for, and Rishid finally moved in. 

“That’s Harry,” Malik said, pointing out the window to where Harry was walking home from school. “He’s the wizard kid Bakura is obsessed with stealing. I guess we should introduce you.”

Malik dodged the couch pillow Bakura hurled at him and stuck his head out the door to invite Harry in. 

“Very nice to meet you,” Harry said, eyes wide. 

“The pleasure is mine,” Rishid replied. 

Rishid was a very physically intimidating man in a way that Bakura and Malik just weren’t. He was tall and wide and he had dramatic facial tattoos. If Harry was still passing gossip on to his aunt, she’d wet herself over Rishid’s bald-with-a-very-long-ponytail look alone. 

Rishid was, notably, also a lot nicer than Bakura or Malik. He had a soft big brother voice, even. 

“Malik said you liked games,” Rishid said to Harry, and he produced a card deck from his coat. It was a regular poker deck, but the cards were all printed with pictures of a city– likely bought last-minute at a souvenir shop in an airport, but still more thoughtful than Harry was used to. “I got this in Budapest.”

“Oh, wow, thank you!” Harry exclaimed. 

“Rishid is going to make sure your family doesn’t get out of line while we go on a trip,” Bakura said. 

Harry nodded seriously, leafing carefully through his new deck of playing cards. “Back to Egypt, right?”

Bakura could not recall if he’d actually explained much to Harry. He’d told him what the weird soul baby was and that there were other weird soul babies out there, and that Harry was a wizard, and probably Harry had overheard them planning their trip. Harry was taking it all remarkably in stride, although he seemed doubtful of his own magicalness-- Bakura had tried teaching him some  _ heka _ a handful of times and it hadn’t gone well. 

(“Do  _ not  _ teach the child shadow magic,” Ishizu had warned, as if Bakura would do something that irresponsible. Even the pharaoh’s priests waited until thirteen to start learning shadow rituals.) 

“Sure, I’ll play Monopoly with you while they’re gone,” Rishid agreed, because Rishid was a  _ fool.  _

Maybe Bakura could bully Rishid into playing Monster World with him…? No, he’d worry about that later. 

All in all, the three of them made it to Luxor, Egypt without much hassle. Really, Bakura likely could have done the trip by himself, but apparently he needed  _ two _ Tombkeepers to watch him because he had a history of diabolic evil or whatever. At least he’d have back-up if that Shaadi person showed up. 

They rented a car from the airport, stayed the night in a mediocre hotel, and then got up early to gather supplies and drive to the site of the Tomb of the (Formerly) Unnamed Pharaoh. 

Two Tombkeepers were waiting there to greet them, which wasn’t strange. The both of them had the same shocking lavender eyes as Malik and no other shared features– probably distant cousins or something. 

Despite everything, Malik was still family head by birthright and by right of his initiation ritual. The Tombkeepers offered him polite bows even though their body language showed barely withheld animosity (which, honestly, Malik deserved). Ishizu, being the sibling who didn’t go off to conquer the world with card games and dark magic, received a much warmer welcome. 

They pointedly ignored Bakura, and that was fine. 

“There’s been a bit of a complication,” the older of the two Tombkeepers said. 

The complication was that the site of the tomb was swarming with wizards. 

The Tombkeepers had a special word for them, which translated to something like “magical strangers.” It was a word that they would have used to describe both the likes of Bakura and Pegasus J. Crawford, people who had a chance of making it through the first floor of the tomb without being killed. Bakura watched a pained look cross Ishizu’s face, and imagined that she was wondering how many actual, literal wizards had come to disturb the tomb without any of them realizing there was an entire secret society of them. 

With a determined look on her face, Ishizu ploughed forward into the mess of tents and wizards and demanded to speak to their leader. Malik was only family head in title, and everyone knew it. 

“I thought you people were a myth,” the leader of the wizards said, looking dumbfounded. He was an older man named Amir, and he wore a set of colorful robes and had a wand just like Dumbledore. 

“We’ve decided to become more public,” Ishizu offered through gritted teeth. 

(The inside of Amir’s tent looked like a regular office with glass windows and thick carpets, which made no sense. Ishizu was so determined to tell him off for digging up the tomb without permission, she didn’t even seem to notice.)

Lots of people, magical and non-magical alike, had died going into the Tomb of the Unnamed Pharaoh. The ones that lived– almost all of them magical– usually went insane during the process. Sometimes Tombkeepers met with them to warn them off, then when no one listened to them, passively watched the intruder die or go insane. The end result was that many strange legends had sprouted up. 

The legend that the place was deeply cursed was true. So was the legend about there being special ancient guardians, but Bakura could see how Egyptian magical authorities might dismiss that idea as ridiculous hearsay. 

Amir was currently leading an international team of wizards in the largest modern effort yet of excavating the tomb. Several curses in the top floor of the tomb had been broken recently by “an unknown player” (Bakura’s guess: by the Pharaoh himself returning), and so the wizards thought they might finally have a shot at actually getting into the tomb. 

The good news was that the wizards had conveniently cleared the collapsed entrance for Bakura and the Ishtars. The bad news was that no one could get past the first level, and several people had died. 

“That’s insane,” Amir said when Bakura said he’d have a go. “You’re completely untrained. No, I can’t let you down there. But, Miss Ishtar, if you could answer a few questions…”

Malik and Bakura were unceremoniously kicked out of Amir’s tent, although the Tombkeepers were allowed to stay. 

“I’m the  _ family head,” _ Malik whined. 

“You’re an online card salesman, and you look the part to boot,” Bakura told him. He couldn’t help but suspect that if  _ they’d _ dressed in fancy robes, the wizards would let them in on their secret conversations. “C’mon, let’s look around.”

They got a lot of odd looks, but no one stopped them from wandering around between the tents on site. There was a lot of magic in the air, more than anything Bakura had ever felt outside of the Pharaoh’s palace and the most cursed tombs. It was simultaneously refreshing and oppressive. 

Bakura and Malik spent a bit of time watching a man use a wand to guide a knife in cutting up vegetables and then levitating them into a pot over a fire. That just seemed like an absurd waste of magic. 

Bakura’s end goal, of course, was to figure out how to sneak through the camp at night and then into the tomb. The camp itself didn’t seem to have many security measures, but there were all sorts of spells set up around the entrance to the tomb that could be tricky. 

“Sorry, sirs, we’re closed for business,” a redheaded man said, sprinting over to them when Bakura got too close. He had an English accent, an entire galaxy of freckles, and a friendly smile.

_ Kindred spirits, _ Bakura thought as Malik’s eyes automatically focused on the man’s earring, which was some kind of ridiculous tooth. 

“Are you visitors?” the man asked. 

“Something like that,” Malik said. 

The man grinned and offered his hand. “Bill Weasley,” he said. “I’m on break if you want a tour.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone: You can't keep Harry.  
> Bakura, who literally just wanted like a couple game nights or something: well shit, now i gotta :/
> 
> \--
> 
> Dumbledore: Horcruxes are the darkest of wizarding magic.  
> Bakura, who just rips up and slaps his and others' souls into things for fun: Fascinating. 
> 
> I found this chapter pretty frustrating to write, as it had to cover a lot of exposition. I also re-wrote the conversation with Dumbledore a couple times because it seemed like readers were making some assumptions about what Dumbledore would know/think about the situation. Basically, he doesn't know the Dursleys are currently soulless, just that they're in hospital and Harry's having too much fun with the wrong family lmao. 
> 
> I don't think the way the blood wards actually work makes much sense in canon or as I've presented them here, B U T also they're not important beyond that they exist to protect Harry from a threat, and if anyone wants to remove Harry from his biological family, they're going to have to deal with that threat. :)


End file.
